Mass Effect: Condemned
by Lord Zeuss
Summary: Convicted and sentenced by court-martial to serve an eighteen-year prison sentence, Cara Shepard is recruited by an unorthodox Alliance Admiral for his brainchild project: a rogue task force to police the lawless Attican Traverse. Ruthless prologue story.
1. Chapter 1

_The sharp sound of thick steel pins retracting into the armored door of her cell broke the muddled silence that forever reigned in this quarter of the solitary housing unit where she'd been for the last four days. Harsh light stabbed into the blackness, slashing painfully across her dark-acclimated eyes and shielding the brawny figures who rushed in just behind the blinding vanguard._

_ Eyes stinging, arms and legs shackled, she lunged forward. Her head caught the first one in the stomach like a battering ram, sending him crashing to the floor, heaving and choking breathlessly. She bent over and drove her shoulder and elbow into the neck of the next one who came rushing. She could hardly see anything, going by instinct alone as she leaned down and bit into the CO's forehead with her teeth, causing him to scream in pain._

_ From behind, the first CO managed to snag her feet, causing her to fall hard, tearing some skin off in her teeth as she growled savagely._

_ Then the blows came. Enraged and infuriated, the two COs took turns kicking and beating her viciously. The shackles prevented her from using her hands to shield her face, so she curled into a ball and weathered the beating until they began to lose interest._

_ "Hold her down!" she heard another voice from above, and immediately she started kicking again, knowing what was coming. One of the COs slugged her good with his fist, dazing her, and the next moment she felt the needle entering her arm, the plunger pushed down to its stopper, and the chemicals pouring into her bloodstream._

_ It only took her seconds to pass out._

"Rise and shine, Buttercup!" It was the shock of the icy water in her face more than the snarky voice that woke Cara Shepard from the drug-induced sleep. Instead of opening her eyes, she held them shut tight and braced against what she knew was coming. Right on cue, the MP punched her in the face, tearing open the perpetual split in her lip.

Spitting blood, Cara took stock of her new situation. She was still dressed in her customary orange prison garb, her hands cuffed together behind her back and attached via high tensile-strength chains to the shackles on her ankles, which were stretched painfully tight around the lip of the chair in which she sat. And judging from how solid it felt, Cara suspected the chair was even bolted to the floor. She wouldn't be able to so much as scratch her nose if she wanted to. The thought immediately made her eyebrow itch, but she blinked away the sensation.

Cara leered up at the man who'd struck her, a pretty standard run-of-the-mill MP. "Get sixed," she growled at him.

The MP grimaced and raised his fist again, ready to deliver more punishment. Cara grinned at him, egging him on, but a voice from across the room brought the potential beatdown to a premature end.

"That's enough, Chief!"

Across from her at the table dominating the center of the spartan but decidedly un-prison-like conference room sat a distinguished-looking gentleman preening in a military dress outfit, nursing a Holmesian pipe in a distracted hand. He motioned for the MP to stand down. "I really don't think that's necessary. We're all civilized people here, aren't we?"

Cara scoffed, hacking up phlegm from the back of her throat, which she then expunged in a violent, bloody mass onto the table. "Yes sir. Civilized. You can six yourself."

The man tapped his pipe on the table and sighed. "I suppose this is about what I was expecting. You know who I am?" he asked.

"What makes you think I give two craps who you are?" Cara shot back.

"Oh?" He looked genuinely surprised. "This might." He snapped his fingers lightly and a long, wide viewport opened up to her left, offering a view of an orbital skyline as breathtaking as any Cara had ever seen.

At first she was ready to spit at him and tell him to get sixed again, but the sight unexpectedly drew her in as she began to realize it wasn't just any orbital skyline. This one was rather special to her.

"Shanxi," she said, transfixed.

The man nodded, took a drag of his pipe. "Mm-hmm, been a while, hasn't it?"

Cara nodded. "Yes sir, it has."

"How long?"

Stupid question. Cara wrenched her gaze from the planet's surface to scowl in irritation at the pipe-sucker. He had to know. If he was the one responsible for getting her here in the first place, he had to know how long it had been since she was at Shanxi.

"Six and a half years," she answered flatly. Six and a half sordid, excruciating years.

A puff of smoke. "I would presume you know why."

Even dumber question. Cara didn't even dignify it with a response.

"Yes, the Fugitive Four incident. As I recall, you were sentenced by court martial to serve eighteen years for insubordination, sabotage of Alliance property, and unauthorized use of lethal force against an allied operative."

Cara spat another round of bloody mucus at the snob in the suit, but missed. "Ten points. You can read."

Pipe-Sucker exhaled another plume of smoke and leaned forward with an earnest expression on his face, his patience unaffected by her attitude. "I'm simply trying to assess your awareness of your situation."

"Oh, I'm aware of it, alright. You bet your ass I'm aware of it." Cara stared out the window at Shanxi far below, sinking back into bitterness. "I saved our unit from asari treachery, not that I got thanked one bit for it. You asses sold me out to kiss up to the Citadel, it's too late to change that. I did what I had to, you just refused to see that. And I don't give a crap what intel had to say about it after the fact." She shot him another glare. "Get sixed."

The man took a long, contemplative drag of his pipe. "Political landscapes change," he said. "You don't need to make me your enemy. After all, we're both interested in the same thing: protecting mankind, even if we have to go the extra mile. We're cut from the same cloth, Shepard, and I can make good things happen for you, I just want your cooperation."

Cara scoffed. "Do I look like I'm in a position not to cooperate? Just tell me who in the frack you are. For the moment I'm interested."

Pipe-clutching lips parted in a devious smile, as if he were relieved to finally be getting down to business. "Rear Admiral Lucian Stockholm, newly-appointed commander of the Frontier Security Task Force, at your disposal."

She raised her eyebrow dubiously at him. "I'd shake your hand, Admiral..."

"Yes, that's a matter I hope I can clear up by the time we're done. You see, right now I _am_ the Frontier Security Task Force. It technically exists, but only on papers. It was meant to keep me out of trouble, but I intend to make as much of it as I possibly can, and I think you can help."

Cara hated to admit it, but now she was interested. "Alright, spill. What's Frontier Security?"

"Just what it sounds like." Stockholm gestured out the window. "You know, Shanxi used to be on the outer limits of our space frontier, and our current frontier is no more secure than was Shanxi. Less, even. We're spread all over the Attican Traverse and temptingly vulnerable to every criminal syndicate and pirate gang with the ships to get there." He took the pipe from his mouth and clenched it in a fist. "One would think that we would concentrate our efforts on keeping those colonies secure, but politicians have well-documented problems with seeing military fact. So, for sticking my nose in Consulate business, I got handed this paper tiger and told to be happy while they suck up to the Council.

"But you see, they should never have done that. Because I'm going to turn their paper tiger into a real one. With teeth. With your help, Commander, I'm going to make them eat their words."

Cara blinked. "Commander?"

Stockholm nodded and stuck the pipe back in his mouth. "As of this moment, you are a Lieutenant Commander of the Systems Alliance. Your dishonorable discharge is stricken from the record, your slate is clean. I'm building Frontier Security from the ground up and that's where I want you; on the ground. You'll be my commander of all groundside troops."

"You sure this is what you want, Admiral?" Cara asked. She gave her MP the evil eye. "Pretty Boy's not going to like me with my shackles off. If you're looking for discipline, I could be something of a problem for you."

Lucian Stockholm chuckled. "You're good at what you do, Shepard, that's all I need from you. If I wanted a by-the-book drone like the kind they feed into the officer corps these days I'd be at the assembly line, watching military regs crank them out like clockwork. But as far as the Service Chief goes, you should be busy enough not to give him too much trouble, don't you think? After all, there's soldiers to assess, re-assign, and train for new posts. Then there's pirates to kill, rebellions to put down." He gave her a wink. "Spies to be rooted out."

Cara grinned. "I might just be starting to like you, Admiral."

Rear Admiral Stockholm, Man In A Suit, Pipe-Sucker, Alliance bigwig reduced to a garbage post he was making his own, smiled. "Would you please release her restraints, Chief?"

The MP gave her a wary look, then bent down to remove her shackles and cuffs.

Instantly, without even taking a moment to stretch the newly-liberated limbs, Cara sprang up from the chair, swinging with her right arm to deliver a smashing roundhouse to the MP's chin. Teeth were loosened, his head was probably ringing like a bell, but she could have done much worse. It was enough for a warm-up, at least.

The MP staggered, clutching his jaw as Cara flexed her fist experimentally. She drew in a deep breath. "I can't begin to tell you how good that felt." She gave the MP a spiteful shove on the forehead with two fingers. "Until next time."

She grinned at Admiral Stockholm. "I feel more civilized already. Let's get on with this, then."

**Mass Effect: Condemned**

_SSV Ardenne _was a piece of crap.

The aged ship probably dated back to the First Contact War, its mass effect drive was clumsy, ineffectual, and inconsiderately loud. Whenever Cara ventured into the aft section of the ship she was careful to wear ear protection. Half the engineering crew, she was sure, had to be deaf. Life support filled the interior cabin with a rancid, chilly flow of atmosphere that reeked of ozone, and over half the ladders that connected each deck were rusted and wobbly. Considering the state of the rest of the ship, it was a small wonder the weapons systems worked as well as they did.

But the _Ardenne _was all Frontier Security had to call its own, and Stockholm and Cara had worked long and hard first to requisition the use of the ship from its near-permanent patrol in the fattened sectors of heavily-protected Alliance space where it had slowly rotted due to insufficient funds for proper maintenance. Cara had spent months browbeating private investors into putting up money for Admiral Stockholm so he could afford to hire his own technicians to repair some of Ardenne's more critical systems. The one thing that was fully and satisfactorily operational were its shields. Cara had refused to fly until they were up to one hundred percent operational capacity.

Recruiting soldiers to fill Ardenne's barracks was easier. Cara and Stockholm had done extensive scouting during the months spent securing the ship, and she'd already identified over a dozen men and women she wanted for her personal squad. Dozens more, upon learning of Frontier Security's mission, had fallen over themselves volunteering.

Plenty were eager, either for revenge or the promise of action, so Cara had no want for men to lead, the only limiting factor was the issue of ships. but if she and Stockholm had their way, that would cease to be a problem. Effective and efficient troop transportation and support could be theirs if all went right.

Shanxi had served as the fledgling task force's surrogate home base pending formal deployment. Stockholm had his eye on territory in the Attican Beta for the base of operations, so his future fleet could be close to trouble when it struck, and able to strike back twice as hard.

They were preparing to leave and the Admiral had asked her to meet him in his quarters. He probably wanted to share a customary bottle of wine with her as they shipped out. So Cara perspired in the cold air as she climbed a rickety ladder in a poorly lit shaft on an indecently loud ship to meet with her commander on the upper deck. Once above, she passed the bridge crew with hardly a glance, shuffling through the cramped space with familiar ease.

At his desk in the captain's cabin, Stockholm wasn't in his formal dressware; he rarely was when not on official business. While the first ship-out of a newly-created task force might have qualified as "official" to some, Cara had learned over the months that the Admiral had a very loose style of operating that was, in fact, quite similar to her own. He was wearing the standard casual blues, the short sleeves baring his masculine arms.

The Admiral was spry and fit for a man of seventy. An exercise fanatic like her, they often spent time in the gym together, and Cara knew him to have the endurance of a stallion, and strong enough to wrestle an ox. His thick brown hair showed no signs of recession or graying, bright green eyes burned with a devious intelligence sharpened by age, and the few wrinkles on his face served only to highlight his masculine features rather than obscure them.

A dark bottle of wine sat on his desk, untouched. The pipe, however, looked not to have left his mouth; pungent smoke filled the room.

Cara saluted loosely. "Lucian."

The Admiral put up a hand, as if to deflect her forwardness. "Thank you for coming, Shepard."

So, not in the mood, then. Cara eyed the wine bottle. "Are we doing our military duty and boozing up on a ship-out, sir?"

Stockholm chuckled softly. "Maybe a little later. I need to talk to you before we set sail." He set his pipe down.

Cara instantly sobered her expression. "Absolutely, sir. We'll break it off. It could never have worked anyway."

Stockholm frowned, tapping the neck of his pipe on the desk. "Now _that_ we can discuss another time, Cara." He smiled slightly.

She laughed. "Any time, Lucian. Any time."

"No, this is something we've not talked about since I pulled you out of the SHU at Penal Colony PN27; the Contact War."

Cara's eyebrow twitched involuntarily. "What else is there to discuss?"

Stockholm stood and clasped his hands behind his back, a telling gesture that said he was about to get very serious. "Officially, the Turian Hierarchy is not held responsible for the First Contact War, but the Citadel imposed a harsh reparations agreement and prosecution of war criminals which most turians resented. Tactically, they held the advantage at war's end, and could have been considered the victors in the conflict, so the sudden withdrawal and agreement to the Citadel armistice terms came across as a betrayal, a stab in the back, if you will. You can imagine the kind of hate for mankind that fueled within the Turian Hierarchy. And that hate hasn't gone away, despite what the political scene tries to tell you; it's just changed its form."

Cara crossed her arms in irritation. She hated sermons, even Stockholm's. "Get to the point, Admiral."

"My point is, Shepard, that there's a lot of turians who resent and despise us and feel perfectly justified in doing so. They think the Council sold them out at the first sign of a new kid on the block, and many of them will do whatever they think is necessary in order to knock us down a few notches."

"I already knew that, Admiral. How is this any different from what we've discussed before?" She sensed that Stockholm was deliberately skirting around his true point, and his evasion was only putting her more and more on edge.

"Commander, you used your instincts during the Fugitive Four incident, and you might have been right; we may never know for sure. But this is bigger than one wayward asari, what we're dealing with. I want to show you something to help you better understand the kind of sheer inhumanity we're going up against."

He produced what looked like an old shoe box, and that puzzled Cara because she'd never seen it before, and she'd already seen everything in Stockholm's personal quarters. His hand came out with a tiny silvered medallion in the shape of a cross hanging on a thin gold chain.

"Sir?"

"This belonged to Anna Washington, an agricultural worker on Shanxi," he explained, holding the tiny cross in the light. "Her husband Jason served in the colonial militia, along with my father, Sven Stockholm. She was taken captive sometime after the scouring began. Jason became a prisoner of war soon after, when the garrison surrendered to spare further civilian casualties. Jason Washington and the rest of the POWs were freed when Citadel forces intervened, but Anna was never reunited with her husband.

"Alliance diplomatic proxies were always petitioning the turians via the Citadel for the release of captives taken in the scouring, but the Hierarchy stoically denied the existence of any unfreed hostages. It was two years later when a turian ambassador to the Citadel came to Jason Washington with this," he held up the charm, "and a story about how a prosecuted war criminal confessed to finding it on Mrs. Washington's body and taking it for his own. Only, her body was never found; not on Shanxi, not in this alleged turian's possession, nowhere.

"But justice had already been served, apparently, so there was nothing the Alliance could do about it, despite how suspicious it looked. Jason suspected that she'd been taken as a trophy by a turian general and had either starved to death or been poisoned by their food. He knew they murdered her and invented the story to save face.

"Jason Washington was forced to retire from active duty three months later, and he asked Sven to carry his wife's charm, to carry on the fight against monsters who strike at us when we're at our weakest. Sven died a few years back, but I've carried the Washington insignia since the day I made captain."

Cara held his rock-steady gaze as he gently placed the sparkling talisman in her hand.

"Cara, I want you to carry this. I know you're the right person to uphold everything it represents. There will always be victims like Anna Washington; we can't save them all. What we're here for is save as many as we can and punish the monsters who make victims of the others. This goes above affiliation and race, the people who perpetrate these crimes must be made to pay the ultimate price.

"That's what the Frontier Security Task Force stands for, Cara. Save who you can, avenge the ones you can't. We're the Teeth of Vengeance."

His hand enclosing hers, Stockholm closed Cara's fingers around the tiny cross.

She tightened her fist, feeling the hard edges dig into her palms. Her right hand snapped into a crisp salute. "Count on me, sir."

Stockholm smiled as if relieved of an enormous responsibility. "I do." He shook her hand firmly. "Well, Commander, shall we have that wine now?"

* * *

Wiping sticky hands on her dark pants, Cara jaunted back onto the bridge ahead of Admiral Stockholm. She didn't stay for his order to move out, instead heading straight downstairs to the deployment deck, pausing on the ladder to wince as the ship's engines screeched their way up to speed, the rungs beneath her feet and hands trembling sympathetically with the unholy racket shuddering through the whole ship. With one hand on the rung, she fished around in the breast pocket of her drab blue jacket for her earplugs and, somewhat armed against the sonic assault of the Ardenne's outdated engines, she continued downward.

Once the ship reached cruising speed it no longer howled like a troop of rabid monkeys in a machine shop. Cara hopped off the ladder.

The hangar, decontamination chamber, armory and equipment lockers, and training area were all on the deployment level, as well as a number of her and Stockholm's hand-picked ground troops. Most of them came from colonial garrisons, but she had carefully chosen her men mainly from those with substantial combat experience. This would be no mission for a green rookie.

If they saw action, Cara expected no less than half her current squad to be killed in the first deployment. Fighting with no intel was never fun, but she had to do it anyway, to make or break Admiral Stockholm's Frontier Security Task Force.

The men gathered around the lockers didn't seem to mind the uncertain nature of their maiden voyage aboard the crap-ship _Ardenne_. They were checking gear, cracking jokes, and chatting amongst themselves like bar-mates. At least they were, until she entered the room.

Cara was an intimidating woman. Her wilting glare and muscular build was threatening even to those unfamiliar with her reputation. Upon seeing her enter, her Marines instantly cut the joking and stood stiffly at attention, trying to pretend like they had never been anything but stone cold serious. Cara could have laughed.

"Will all you little girls lighten up? We're not attending a funeral." When this garnered nothing but a few confused blinks, she simply said, "At ease, gentlemen," which most seemed to understand.

"We getting underway, Commander?" asked her favorite recruit, a tanned Asian with the unlikely name of Bradley. He was a First Lieutenant and former military liaison officer from Shanxi, one of the ranking officers among the motley crew she and Stockholm had assembled.

Cara opened her locker and began unlacing her boots. "That's right. The engine noise didn't tip you off?"

Bradley shrugged. intent on a diagnostic running on his handheld. "Can you tell me where we're headed. The men don't want to ask."

"YP-T9 in the Attican Beta," she answered, unbuttoning her outer jacket and stowing it in the locker along with her boots. "We're going to set up home camp before taking a stab into the unknown with our glorious rust-bucket."

The Lieutenant scratched his head of black hair while the handheld chimed rhythmically as it scanned his standard-issue Onyx armor. "I can't wait to get to blasting some turian sobs."

"Mm-hmm," Cara muttered, idly touching the cross that dangled from her neck. Casually, she stripped off her shirt. "I'm going to hit the gym, Lieutenant. If you or any of the other ladies need to know more, that's where I'll be."

Still absorbed in his diagnostics, Bradley nodded. "Yes, ma'am, I'll be sure to--" Looking up, he stopped awkwardly. His eyes shifted. "Um, Commander?"

"You're blushing, Lieutenant," Cara noted with some amusement. "Never seen a girl in a sports bra before?"

"No, Commander, I—I'll talk to you later." He went back to stoically reading the diagnostic codes on his handheld, and Cara laughed to herself.

"The gym, Lieutenant," she reminded him.

"Yes, ma'am. I gotcha," he said without looking up.

The training area was properly furnished, to her specifications. Familiar enough with long voyages, Cara had made sure they would never be without adequate exercise and drilling space and proper equipment. Several different sets of weights, benches, and tension machines shared the large room with a wrestling mat, a small combat simulator, and Stockholm's favorite, an aerobics machine. Included as almost an afterthought was a pair of unpartitioned shower heads tucked away in an alcove.

Cara rechecked her earplugs and tied her thick fall of blonde hair into a ponytail before selecting a pair of weights and lying down on the bench to warm up her muscles.

She was getting ready to move up to some high weights when Bradley walked into the gym sporting a tank top that displayed his excellent physique. He gave her a curt glance with significantly more confidence than he'd shown earlier. Still, Cara couldn't resist throwing at least one jab his way.

"For a guy who's never seen a girl in a bra before, Bradley, you're getting to be an old pro pretty fast."

Bradley crossed his arms and flashed a brief smile. "It's your fault."

Cara set the weights down and sat up. "It really is, isn't it?" With a small white towel, she mopped a few beads of sweat from her forehead, craning her neck until she felt the satisfactory pop of joints.

She could tell without looking that Bradley was staring at her. She was muscular for a woman, even before the standard military genetic enhancement hers was an atypical physique and she'd never been shy about it.

Cara flicked her hair back over her shoulder with a jerk of her neck. "Come on, Lieutenant, let's wrestle."

Bradley eyed her suspiciously. "You'll beat me."

Cara laughed and put on a pouting expression. "Come on, it'll be fun!"

His adorable brown eyes said it all; he was weighing the inevitable pain and discomfort against the privilege of being able to touch her, and he wasn't sure what angle she was trying to play on him. Eventually, the inevitable won out.

"Alright, fine."

Cara laughed again. "First take off that shirt and let me see those muscles of yours, Lieutenant."

Bradley scowled, but it was forced. "Is that an order?"

"No, but I can make it one," Cara replied cheerily.

"What the heck." He laughed and pulled the sleeveless shirt up and over his head and stepped onto the wrestling mat.

They locked up. Cara and her strong arms held a definite leverage advantage over the shorter Bradley, but he was bullishly strong for one of his size, and tenaciously hung in despite her advantage. She could feel him trying different angles of attack to break the deadlock, but she held rock solid against his attempts and pushed back even harder.

Suddenly, she felt him give way, but deliberately. For an instant she was off balance, and he exploited it with a quick arm drag, flipping her onto her back. Cara quickly bridged out of his cover, twisting her body so they stood back to back, with her arms locked around his.

Grunting, Cara hefted him up off his feet and planted his shoulders to the mat. She started to count. "One! Two!" Bradley kicked himself out of her hold before she reached three and retreated a few steps. Cara got back to her feet and rubbed her hands together eagerly. She was just getting warmed up.

She beckoned with a hand. "Come on, Lieutenant, show a girl what you can do."

He rushed her faster than she'd expected. Not fast enough, though. She was ready and waiting for him, planting a boot in his gut and just as fast seizing his midsection with her powerful arms to heave him up and over in a belly-to-belly suplex. She could hear the breath leave his lungs in a whoosh as she drove him down hard onto the mat, his head bouncing back from the impact.

Bradley groaned and tried to get up, but Cara immediately wrapped her arms around his neck in a sleeper hold. His arms flailed in an unsuccessful attempt to dislodge her arms from about his head.

"Now," she said into his ear, "now we can talk about the assignment, sound good?"

Bradley wheezed something. He was starting to turn blue. Cara loosened her grip a little bit, easing the pressure on the blood vessels in his neck so he wouldn't pass out. "Okay," he managed to rasp.

"You ever heard of Hera?" she asked, jerking his head around so he wouldn't get any ideas about being able to escape.

"No, Commander," he gasped. "Not unless you're talking about the Greek goddess." He tried to pry at one of her hands to release her grip, but Cara just squeezed harder and he forgot about it.

"It's a planet on the frontier, in the Traverse," she explained, "targeted for colonization. Alliance surveyors have been over it and over it, they even cleared a little land for the first settlement, Atreus City. It wasn't much, just enough to land some trailers and other equipment so they could get to work."

Bradley continued to claw at the stone-like muscles in her arm to no effect. She just squeezed harder and made him give up the effort. "Is there anything special about it?" he breathed desperately.

"Objectively, no. The colonial board passed a series of budget cuts and the Hera project was scrapped." She let up a bit on her hold to let the Lieutenant get some air. "Incidentally, though, piracy in that sector has been on the rise ever since."

The Lieutenant finally gave up on his attempts to pry loose her vise-like arms from his neck, instead struggling to regain a vertical base. Realizing what he was doing, Cara responded by bearing down on him even harder, squeezing against his neck and shoulders like a constrictor as she put her whole body weight on his upper torso.

"Is there a connection?" he somehow managed to ask.

"Our esteemed ambassador to the Citadel, Donnel Udina, seems to think so. Or he at least plays at thinking so. He gave the Admiral orders to take command of Frontier Security Task Force—his paper creation—and 'assess' the 'possibility' of pirate forces utilizing and operating from the Alliance infrastructure on Hera. He and the Admiralty didn't want Stockholm anywhere near their politics, so they thought this would keep him out of trouble."

"But now the Admiral wants to make trouble," Bradley coughed. He had one foot under him and was starting to push up, which Cara fought.

"You're learning, Bradley. Good for you. Yes, the Admiral is making trouble, and we're going to stick this in all their faces and make them give Frontier Security the backing it deserves."

Once Bradley was able to get his other foot up, Cara knew it would happen fast, and it did. He gave a mighty push, forcing her upward. As he was heaving her whole body up on his shoulders, he reached his arms up over her head and locked his hands together so her head was trapped. She knew what was coming and tried to release her hold, but it was already too late. Bradley let go with his feet and let himself fall back to the mat. Newton took over.

Cara's jaw cracked against her skull like a hammer striking an anvil. Dizzied and stunned, she flopped back on the mat, her whole head aching and grinning like an idiot. A few feet away, Bradley took a few deep breaths and spat an expletive from his mouth.

"Let's never do that again, Commander," he almost pleaded.

Cara couldn't stop grinning. "I told you it would be fun."

Bradley just shook his head.

After a minute, Cara sat up and wiped sweat from her forehead. "Fun's over, I guess." She cocked her head at Bradley. "Unless you feel like helping me shower?"

Bradley chuckled. "No, Commander. I'll leave you to it."


	2. Chapter 2

For a ship of its tonnage, _Ardenne_ had a small crew. Aside from the Navy personnel retained from the original crew, Cara helped hand-pick nearly everyone else, and knew each of them at least by reputation.

The aged ship's pilot, Flight Lieutenant Victor "Sparrow" Perez, had been at the helm of the _Ardenne_ for fifteen years, and Stockholm had seen little need to replace either him or any of the CIC staff. Ground combat personnel, however, were recruited from a variety of posts and stations around human-settled space.

At the top of that list were Operations Chief Alvin Hyatt, a prodigious NCO from the garrison on Mindoir, First Lieutenant Ichiyo Bradley, a multi-lingual liaison officer from Shanxi who was Cara's personal favorite, as well as Staff Lieutenant Abdul Haytham and Gunnery Chief Fergus Bellamy, a pair of iron men from Ceres, a particularly nasty, resource-rich world in the Traverse where the Alliance maintained a heavy industrial presence mining for vital minerals. All the top names were combat specialists, men who had impressed in significant engagements and were known quantities.

Not all had such telling resumes, however. Cara's bunkmate, Franca Garces, was only a corporal and had seen little action at her post with the garrison on the colony of Elysium in the Skyllian Verge. But she was a proven sniper, and along with her spotter, Service Chief Julius Ricketts, made a team that—although they had been in no noteworthy engagements—was good enough to catch Stockholm and Cara's attention.

At the moment, Garces had assumed her preferred sniper's position—prone—on her and Cara's shared bunk in the crew's cabin while she read a romance novel—with a pen. Due to the extra personnel on board, the whole crew would hot-bunk, dividing sleep cycles.

"Hey, Franca," Cara said as she hopped onto an unoccupied bunk directly above.

"Commander, I just want to say thank you for assigning me and Ricketts to your ship."

"You earned it, kid. So how'd you and Ricketts get stuck with each other, anyway?" Cara asked. She'd read the file, but their partnership was downplayed, little more than a notation reflecting the fact that as a team, they scored higher in cooperative training scenarios than when evaluated by themselves. It was mostly word-of-mouth that put her in Cara's searchlight.

Cara had watched the vids of some of those tests, and she recognized when two people knew each other well enough to read minute changes in body language and interpret commands from each other without words or even the standard hand signals soldiers had been using for hundreds of years.

Below her, Garces turned pages, and occasionally Cara would hear the scritch of her pen as she vandalized the book with some snappy commentary in the margins. "We've been together since the academy. We met when I moved to Elysium with _mami_, right after my father finished four years on Shanxi, trying to clean it up after the war. Ricketts and I were military kids; his dad died on Shanxi, mine tried to put it back together. We had a lot to talk about, even joined the academy together. I just wanted to make my _mami_ and _papi_ proud. I'm sure you know how it is."

Before Cara could respond, a stiff shudder ran through the ship, followed closely by a loud boom that was heard even above the racket of the ship's engines and the entire craft lurched violently. Garces' romance novel flew from her grasp before the ship righted itself.

Cara made good use of her prison education and rattled off nearly every human language swear word she'd ever bothered to learn, while Garces swore in Spanish. "What was that?"

"That's what I'd like to know," Cara growled, dropping down to the floor and clicking the intercom on the wall nearby. But Stockholm was already hailing her from the bridge. _"Shepard, get down to engineering and find out from Lindemann what in the blazes was that."_

"Are we under attack, sir?"

Stockholm cursed something indistinct. _"No, we shouldn't be. At least that's what Sparrow and the _Ardenne_'s sensors are saying. Our kinetic barriers haven't taken damage, and structural integrity of the ship is intact. We think it was some kind of engine malfunction, fracking outdated--"_

"Alright! I'm on it, sir!"

_"Be snappish, Shepard. I need to know what my ship's doing."_

"I will, sir. Shepard, out."

Garces winced. "Engineering Deck, you're going there?"

"Looks like."

"Isn't everyone down there deaf?"

"Most of them. There's no sense in having audio communications to that level; all we'd get was feedback and engine noise. I get to play messenger. Lucky me."

Cara stuck a pair of plastic earpieces in her ears and headed for the nearest ladder down to the Engineering Deck. At the bottom, she picked up a pair of well-worn drydock officer's ear protectors and fitted them over her head to keep from being deafened by the roar of _Ardenne_'s obsolete and ill-repaired drive core. All the engineers had ear protection such as this, and even with it, most of them were hard of hearing. Chief Engineer Klaus Lindemann was almost stone deaf.

When he requisitioned the ship, Stockholm had hung on to most of the original engine crew because they were already acclimated to the _Ardenne_'s "unique" equipment, and he wasn't of a mind to deafen any more Alliance personnel than he had to. Ideally, they should have replaced the old drive core, but some things had had to wait, given FSTF's tight funding situation.

Down the rabbit hole into Engineer Lindemann's domain was a world entirely different from the one most of the crew was used to seeing. Engineering Deck was tangled with a maze of pipes, steel grates placed at odd and seemingly arbitrary angles, rusted valves leaking a variety of gaseous compounds into the air, and the perpetual condensation dripping from the ceiling as if the entire ship were sweating. Aside from the roar of the engines, the air itself seemed to pulse with energy in tune to some mechanized heartbeat, moving back and forth through the steel jungle like she was walking inside a giant metal lung.

Even though it didn't cover very large an area, anyone not properly trained would quickly become lost in the myriad twists and turns of the Engineering Deck. Due to the space constraints and the simultaneous need to access various parts of the engine systems, the mechanized heart of the ship was labyrinthine, so Cara had taken the time at drydock to have Lindemann and two other engineers walk her through the most commonly-used paths to the main drive core assembly housing. She'd familiarized herself well with those routes, and followed a mental map of that twisting, convoluted path through the ship's steaming innards to take her to Lindemann, a tall, lanky German engineer who was one of the few on the ship taller than her. He was in his customary spot at the datacenter looking in on the rotating blue glow of the core's intake manifold, directly above the main core. Cara tapped him on the shoulder and made a few quick signs with her hands.

_What was that bump about?_

Lindemann gestured rapidly, his signs a little hard for Cara to follow. _The primary buffer conduit failed after we hit the Relay. We're running diagnostics to determine an alternative._

Cara rolled her eyes. _You told the Admiral that buffer conduit would last another week._

The engineer gave her an exasperated expression, his signs large and angry. _That was a month ago, Commander!_

Cara shook off her frustration. _Do we still have thrusters? Is just the main drive out?_

The chief engineer nodded. _Thrusters are fine and kinetic barriers should still be operational, but we've lost FTL and are running on inertia at the moment. The Admiral's going to have to adjust his ETA, but _Ardenne_ should get there no problem._

_But can you fix it?_

The big German rolled his shoulders and then grinned at her, suddenly reminding Cara that she'd left her shirt in the crew's cabin. _Are you hot?_

* * *

An angry burst of seething projectiles whizzed past her head, peppering the dirt and stone just inches from her face.

Cara maintained an easy grip on the stock of her rifle as she crouched behind a barrier of blasted rock, letting all four of her enemies expend their fire harmlessly into her cover. To their credit, they were good, staggering their fire so they didn't get caught all reloading at the same time, but their attack strategy was repetitive and boring. Cara already knew how to beat them at it.

Rolling to her side once she heard the sharp whine of an overheat and sharp click of a thermal clip being ejected, Cara tossed a short-fuse grenade at the opposite side of the gorge to draw fire, and at the same time opened up with her rifle. She hit one squarely in the chest with her spray, grazed another. Utilizing that moment of uncertainty, Cara skirted to the side of the steep embankment just below her two squad-mates.

They were cornered at the end of a U-shaped depression, steep earth walls rising up to either side, wreckage from old buildings and blasted military equipment buried in the dirt all around providing them some cover from the assault. Cara leaned up against a massive concrete slab while above her, her two squad-mates, Chief Ricketts and Corporal Garces, had ensconced themselves in the remains of some kind of scaffold with a high vantage point.

After leaning out to take another few shots with her assault rifle, Cara thumbed on the voice-activated radio link in her helmet. She could see enemy reinforcements joining with those already in the gorge, and she guessed they were about to move in, now that they were confident with their number advantage.

"Look sharp, ladies," she snapped on the squad channel. "Tangos approaching."

Ricketts must have seen them too, for just a second later he exclaimed, "Charlie Foxtrot!"

Brawny, tall, and of African descent, Ricketts was Garces' spotter, the man who found her targets to waste with her mad rifle skills. At the moment, however, the corporal had more than enough enemies to worry about and few strategic marks. She would have stayed up there shooting all day, as long as Ricketts and Cara could give her covering fire long enough to take the shots.

A long spray of bullets stitched the side of the scaffold above her. Cara heard Garces curse in her native Spanish and then Ricketts over the radio, calling for another diversion of fire. "Shepard, Franca's got a shot, but we just need a second's distraction."

"Roger, I'll draw their fire." Cara leaned out and chucked another grenade at the advancing enemy, standing in plain view after the blast to send a long burst from her rifle. A few rounds ricocheted off her shields, signaling the time for her to start running.

She dove from cover to cover, in the opposite direction of her teammates, taking shots with her rifle wherever she could and providing an excellent show for the attackers while Garces lined up her shot.

Garces' sniper rifle erupted with a satisfying crack that echoed off the sides of the drunken gorge. Cara saw the man fall, having taken Franca's shot in the chest.

"_Adios, pendejo!_" Garces shrieked over the radio.

Her moment of triumph was short-lived, as Cara saw a man duck out from behind cover of his own with an RPG launcher hefted to his shoulder. She opened her mouth to scream at Garces and Ricketts to redirect their fire, but it was already too late.

The rocket-propelled grenade hit just below the scaffold, the explosion ripping through the floor and tearing it apart like a box of twigs. Just like that, Ricketts and Garces were gone.

Cara roared incoherently as debris showered down into the gorge. She had no more grenades on her belt and her rifle would make no more than one or two shots before her thermal clip was depleted. Cursing, she threw down the cumbersome weapon, drew a pistol, and crouched down into a small crater in the side of the embankment, just behind a scarred wind-worn boulder, confident she hadn't been seen.

The gorge went quiet as the enemy, believing themselves victorious, halted their fire and began to once again advance into the depression toward her last-known position to finish her off. They knew she wasn't part of the sniper team, but they might have assumed she'd retreated or possibly been caught in the backlash from the explosion. They were reasonably sure she was down, but couldn't be certain, and Cara intended to capitalize on that uncertainty.

She waited until they were nearly atop her. She could hear the rasp of breath past the visors of their helmets, could feel their footfalls in the earth beneath her. Cara forced herself to allow no sounds, no movement of any kind, melding into the landscape and becoming one with it.

One of the opposing team took the penultimate step, inches away, and Cara suddenly surged forward, driving the top of her helmeted head upward into the closest chin. The man was knocked back and off his feet, and his companions hesitated, watching their point man hit the ground, reeling from the shock to his jaw. Still moving forward, Cara dipped low, planting her hands on the ground and cartwheeled her body forward, landing in the midst of her opponents.

Hand still clutching her gun, she pistol-whipped the nearest man and crashed her elbow into another's throat. She disarmed him with a swinging kick and pounced, wrapping a free arm around his neck and jamming the barrel of her pistol against the side of his helmet as she back up into the side of the embankment. He froze instantly, as did the rest of his squad.

Cara gave a savage jerk to the man's head. "Come on, shoot me!" she taunted the rest of the men.

No one moved. They kept their guns at the ready, but no one fired, and no one made a move for her and her prisoner.

"Come on, you retarded sobs," Cara growled. "Shoot me!"

But none of them did. They were worried about the hostage.

Angrily, Cara put a bullet in the man's head.

"Cut it! Cut it now!" she yelled in disgust, and abruptly the scenery changed. The entire environment sloughed away, exposing the mundane reality of riveted steel bulkheads behind rock faces, patterned non-slip tiles beneath the hard-packed dirt, and underneath it all the orange grid lines from eight highly-advanced projection matrices which had transformed the giant warehouse into a post-apocalyptic training scenario.

"Dead" Marines got up from "fatal" injuries, took off their helmets and picked up the neutered weapons. The soldier Cara had just shot in the head turned to her apologetically. "I'm sorry, ma'am. That wasn't my best effort ever."

"I'll say," Cara growled, as she ripped off her helmet and made a bee-line for the leader of the opposing team, the thin-nosed Ops Chief Hyatt.

"Hyatt, that was bloody pathetic! What were you thinking?"

Hyatt gave her a surprised look. "I was thinking of my team's safety," he said, standoffish.

"Safety?" Cara exploded. "Safety! Your job is to kill the enemy! That's what you signed up to do, and that's what I expect from you. Your team is only safe when your enemy is dead. You should have eliminated the threat, but instead you decided to put your teammate's fate in my hands—an enemy's hands. You've got too much faith in your enemies, Hyatt!" she snarled.

Surprisingly, Hyatt didn't seem cowed by her tirade. In fact, he only seemed irritated. "So that's your solution to everything, then. Just shoot first and ask questions later, no matter who gets in the way? Is that it?" It was as if he hadn't even heard anything of what she'd just said.

Angrily, Cara grabbed the man's collar and rattled him like a two-day-old sack of laundry. "You're a miserable fool, Hyatt!" she spat in his face. "Didn't Mindoir teach you anything? You don't negotiate with these kinds of people, they're not going to listen to anything other than a bullet in their brain. You show even the slightest hint of weakness and it's like chum to a shark. Your job is to keep shooting, do that and you just might stay alive. If you don't, you're probably going to get your team killed." His face inches from hers, Hyatt was still defiant, but he at least registered that she'd spoken to him.

Cara released him with a hot glare. Silence reigned. She abruptly turned to the rest of them. "And that goes for all of you! Dismissed!"

Hyatt glowered at her and slunk off to the lockers with a few other Marines as they all broke off into little groups representing the various regiments and divisions from which they'd been drafted. Cara was beginning to be sorry she'd recruited them in the first place; they splintered at the wrong times and, as Hyatt had brilliantly demonstrated, could be indecisive at crucial moments.

And all this just as they were about to rocket into their first, most critical mission. Things just got better and better.

Her two protegés, Ricketts and Garces, at least seemed to get what she was saying. Except for Bradley, she'd spent more time with the two of them than any of the other Marines in her new unit, and they were both solid.

As she walked by, Cara took the corporal by the arm. "Franca."

She must have expected a similar tirade, because her Latin features were patterned with a look of consternation. "Commander?"

"You did good, you and Ricketts both." Cara gave the corporal a pleased smile. "That's what I like to see."

"Oh. _Gracias_, ma'am." Garces gave her that cute, brown-eyed smile of hers and left to return her faux rifle to the racks.

Cara went the other direction, to the com-sim operations room, where Bradley was waiting, her "hostage". He rubbed the side of his head, as if she'd really shot him. Following the impulse, Cara loosened her ponytail, swishing hair that was far beyond regulation length.

"Final thoughts on the scenario?" she asked.

Bradley scratched his short-cropped, dark Oriental hair. "I took a bad chance. I shouldn't have been that careless. It won't happen again ma'am."

"And Hyatt?"

"He should have taken the shot. Even if it might cost you one of your team, you have to end the threat before giving him the chance to take you all out."

Cara snorted in disgust. "Maybe if I were batarian he would get the message."

Bradley shook his head. "No, Hyatt's like that. I've seen him, talked to him, listened to him talking to the other Marines. Even if you were batarian, he still would have hesitated."

"Gorram fool. It's a nice ideal but one you can't rely on out here," Cara growled. "I should have shot you straight up. Maybe then he would have acted."

The Lieutenant only shrugged. "If he knew you weren't going to let me go no matter what he did, I'm certain he would have risked the shot. But Hyatt tends to err on the side of caution."

"He's going to get us all killed making a nondecision like that," Cara said flatly.

"Is that experience talking, Commander?"

"Mm-hmm," she muttered. Nondecisions got people killed in the Traverse, or anywhere the lawless made their own rules; the Fugitive Four Incident had proven that to her. With her team under fire, the team leader was unable or unwilling to make the only decision possible, and while he hesitated, friends died. They paid the cost in blood and comrades for that failure to act. In the end, Cara acted, and she was the only reason any of them survived that disastrous mission; because she killed the two-faced asari traitor they were sent to retrieve. She should have been a hero, but was court-martialed instead.

Rather than talk about it, Cara changed the subject. "Do you think they even get the importance of what we're doing?"

Bradley shrugged. "You and the Admiral were always very clear about what this unit stands for, Commander, I don't think they're doubting your resolve. But I think some of them have differing ideas of how we should be going about it. Like Hyatt, for instance; he's all for protecting human interests, but he prefers subtler methods than sticking a gun at everything." He paused. "No offense, Commander."

Cara waved away the comment. "And what about you? What do you think should be our goals?"

The light-heartedness that usually marked his attitude vanished at the question. His face hardened. "I think that we owe ourselves security on our borders, ma'am." He glared through the observation window into the empty com-sim. "If we aren't going to protect our holdings in the Traverse then we shouldn't even be out here, and I sure as heck don't think we ought to tuck our tail between our legs and run for cover. I grew up on Shanxi, ma'am, and I'm more than familiar with Alliance failures to keep its own safe. If you look around, not much has changed, except now it's not the turians carpet-bombing civilian targets, it's the batarians. I've got nothing against cooperation with the Council races, but our first responsibility is to our own, and no one on the Citadel is going to help with our problems. Whether the politicians want to admit it or not, we're in this alone. We have to take action."

Cara looked at him with newfound respect. "You don't get angry nearly enough, Bradley. I wish I had another ten of you."

He smiled ruefully. "Sorry, ma'am. I'm just the one."

Everyone on her ground team was good at what they did, she'd made sure of that, subjecting them to extensive screenings before getting them assigned to Stockholm's Frontier Security Task Force. But as good as each of them was, they were all from different stations, different units, and different ideologies. Figuring out how to mesh all the personalities and temperaments to get them to function as a cohesive whole was critical.

If she couldn't rely on them to watch each other's backs, they were all going to die.


	3. Chapter 3

The frontier world of YP-T9 was dry as a corn husk, much of its two large continents covered by desert. Climatologists surmised its environment was in the middle of a long dry cycle, but whether that was true or not, even its lushest places had little to offer in the way of botanical or zoological diversity compared to similar planets. The hardy grasses clung to hard-packed dirt where orange rock shelves weren't showing through the thin layer of soil, bent perpetually against the stiff, dehydrating breezes.

_SSV Ardenne_ was sheltered from the buffeting winds by a loose ring of pre-fab buildings that comprised the Alliance outpost on the arid planet. Looking out on his single dilapidated ship, Lucian Stockholm carefully lit his pipe and drew a long puff before turning to address the motley crew of Marines from across Alliance space that he and Shepard had put together for his task force. As the smoke left his lungs, he once again thanked the wonders of genetic science for eliminating his need to worry about lung cancer. A plume of thick weed smoke curled from his mouth.

Stockholm snapped his fingers and shutter closed over the window, darkening the room as he stepped up to the podium.

Over thirty Marines were seated in the room, facing him and the viewscreen behind him showed a technical infrastructure map as well as a geographical satellite image of their target.

"Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Atreus City, an Alliance colony on the planet Hera that was terminated in its initial phase of construction. As you can see, it's hardly close to complete, but much of the preliminary work in preparation for the installation of a permanent colony was completed. The savanna leveled off and trees cleared for landing and building sites, several foundations erected, and a nearby river tapped to provide running water."

Stockholm scrolled through several screens highlighting the prominent features of the colony site. Extensive data was gathered in preparation for the colonization, and even more recorded during the initial construction, before funding had fallen through and colonization efforts were turned elsewhere. When he was given his dummy assignment, Stockholm inherited the files on Hera and Atreus City and had spent countless hours poring over the specs until he felt as if he knew every inch of that failed colony.

Sitting up in the front row closest to him with her legs crossed, Shepard drummed her fingers on her knee as if in boredom. She'd already seen all the files on numerous occasions and hardly needed to be briefed, but since she was his ground leader she was obligated to be part of the mission briefing. The rest of the Marines, though, were being brought up to speed on their first assignment as a unit, and everyone listened with rapt attention as Stockholm went over detail after detail.

"In essence, gentlemen, all of this makes Hera, and the Atreus City site in particular, an extremely attractive spot for pirate gangs in the region, whether for a place to stash their goods, as a hideout, or even a main base of operations for the bigger organizations. Considering its remoteness from the nearest Alliance military outpost, Hera is valuable in that regard as well, though thankfully the T9 facility should reduce that particular metric.

"There's no doubt in my mind that there is a pirate presence on or around Hera. Unfortunately, we have no intelligence pertaining to possible pirates activities at the Atreus City site or on Hera."

"So, no word on what to expect on the ground?" asked Ops Chief Hyatt, sitting roughly in the middle.

Stockholm chewed his pipe before answering. "No."

Hyatt swore.

"This is a recon mission as much as it is a potential scouring mission. Our primary objectives are to secure the Atreus City site and assess the pirate presence on Hera," Stockholm went on. "Commander Shepard and I have agreed on a squad-based aggressive reconnaissance strategy. Four group leaders will lead teams of five, operating semi-autonomously toward the same objectives. Commander Shepard will be leading one of these teams, designation Red Team, and the other group leaders will follow her orders. The three other teams will be Chief Hyatt's Blue Team, Lieutenant Bradley's Green Team, and Lieutenant Haytham's Gold Team."

A round of murmurs swept through the contingent at the announcement. Stockholm was aware of the friction that existed between Commander Shepard and Ops Chief Hyatt, but he had faith in their professionalism.

"Commander Shepard will now outline the four teams' strategy," he said, stepping aside from the podium.

Shepard casually flicked her blonde ponytail back over her shoulder as she got up from her seat and picked up the pointer from the podium, bringing on screen a high resolution satellite image of the main city site, where colony's core buildings were intended to go.

"Aside from the pumping station on the river for fresh water, this is where we're most likely to encounter pirate forces and equipment. This is precisely where they would have optimal conditions to set up a temporary camp or a permanent base with the least of effort. I would expect any pirate worth his or her salt to have made good use of we provided.

"With this in mind, we've come up with a multiple-insertion, four-point encirclement plan for securing the outpost. Two drops, two main groups. One will be Haytham's Gold Team, they will capture the pumping station, here." With the pointer, she indicated the head at the river, a few klicks northwest of the city site. "Once clear, Gold Team will move south in support of the second group, Red, Blue, and Green Teams, as they converge on the city site from the west, south, and east. The presence of heavy artillery may necessitate a concerted effort from all three teams of second group, or possibly even all four. Unless ordered otherwise, we stay in radio contact with each other but keep the ship-to-shore channel closed.

"Any questions?"

Haytham, the Staff Lieutenant, also in the front row, raised his hand. "If things go badly, can we expect reinforcements?"

Stockholm interjected himself. "Most of our limited forces will be already deployed on the ground, but provided there is no heavy anti-air defenses, _Ardenne_ should be able to provide a strategic air strike if needed. Now, if there are no more questions?" No one raised a hand. "Alright then. We'll update with whatever new information we might have en route. _Ardenne_ leaves at eighteen hundred hours, so check your gear and find your chairs, Marines."

Every Marine in the room stood and saluted.

"Dismissed."

As they all filed out, Stockholm watched Shepard, who scowled at the door after they were gone.

"Something on your mind, Commander?"

Cara crossed her arms. "Hyatt doesn't like it."

Stockholm took another drag of his pipe. "Doesn't like what?"

"Going under my command. He was a bad acquisition."

Stockholm squinted at her. "Is that an objective assessment, Commander?"

Shepard gave him a hard stare. Her eyes were like chips of blue ice. "I've been running the simulator with him, against him, all sorts of scenarios. He's an exemplary soldier but his execution just doesn't feel right; he's prone to making nondecisions in crises."

Stockholm put his hand on Cara's shoulder. "He's at where you used to be, Cara."

"I was never like him," she retorted, shrugging off his hand.

"Shepard," he sighed, "I talked to some of his instructors at the Academy, some of the most hard to please snobs in the Alliance, and they gave him rave reviews. Give the man some credit. I think you might be giving Bradley too much all the time."

A grin tugged at the corners of Cara's mouth. "No, sir. All I give Bradley are bruises."

Stockholm chuckled. "The man should know better than to be suckered into a wrestling match with you. Maybe I ought to take you to school sometime, show you how a real man wrestles."

Cara's grin widened into a sly smile. "Hmm, you can 'wrestle' me anytime, Lucian. Anytime."

"We've got a mission first, Shepard. Don't forget about that. I didn't strike your record clean just so you could 'wrestle', remember? Frontier Security has to succeed."

Shepard's grin vanished, her severity taking over. "We're not ready yet, Admiral. Why are we pushing this forward, are you under much pressure from the Admiralty?"

He nodded. "After a sort. An ass named Mikhailovich wants his ship back, he even threatened to go to the ambassador. Seems he isn't in on the joke."

"He will be soon enough."

"Isn't that the truth."

Technically, since the Frontier Security Task Force was privately funded and had only a paltry existence on papers in military ledgers, it was not an officially recognized division of the Alliance Navy and had no right to requisition either ships or men. Stockholm and Shepard had utilized a number of regulatory loopholes to put together their current outfit, but they could still be overruled by an executive order high enough up in the food chain.

Frontier Security was meant as a dead-end job to keep Stockholm out of Alliance foreign affairs, out of the Consulate, and content enough to keep his mouth shut and stay out of trouble. His family history was well known and he was considered by the politicians too volatile to be allowed much authority. Yet his rank and abilities as a soldier and a commander necessitated some kind of recognition, in keeping with military doctrine, so the Admiralty and the politicians coughed up the paper tiger that was the Frontier Security Task Force, confident that he could do nothing but accept the meaningless post and do nothing, as they wanted.

But if he were able to prove that his outfit could accomplish real tasks with real benefits to human interests, the public reaction alone would change his political stature, and he could then rightly demand legalization for his new task force.

It was all depending on Shepard and her ground teams to get the job done. But then, that was why he picked her in the first place. Cara Shepard got jobs done. She proved that six and a half years ago.

* * *

"Are you all clear on our mission objectives?" Cara asked as she and her four-man squad moved through the armory.

"Transparently, ma'am," answered Fergus Bellamy as he strapped a grenade belt around his waist along with his tech equipment.

"Ricketts, Garces?"

The sniper tightened her rifle's shoulder harness. "Aye aye, Commander."

Corporal Tim Fraser, holding a rifle in one hand and a shotgun in the other, gave her a nod. "Ready to kick ass, Shepard."

Cara grunted her approval. "We've got no intelligence support heading into this op, so I want you to be prepared for anything." That was always a worst-case scenario for any kind of operation. having no intel on a target area meant you had absolutely no idea what you could be facing. Every plan, strategy, and tactic was a gamble when dealing with so many unknown variables. Lack of intel was what got entire teams killed for nothing; a situation with which Cara was experienced.

"A creed you're going to have to get used to is 'expect the unexpected', as cliched as that sounds. You're going to have to make snap decisions that can cost you your life if you get it wrong. In such a situation, any hesitation can be deadly, so you don't. As your commander, that's an order; if you think an action is necessary, you take it and you take it immediately." Her gaze traveled round, looking into each pair of eyes individually, weighing the humanity she found in them.

As usual, this soul-searching was about as helpful as sticking cotton in her ears in an attempt to hear more clearly. She didn't understand the obsession about looking into someone's eyes. They'd prove themselves to her by the choices they made, not by some look-into-my-eyes nonsense.

Abruptly, she turned on Garces. "Franca, how many people do you want to kill?"

The dark-haired corporal blinked in surprise, not expecting the question. "Commander?"

"How many people, corporal?"

"None, Commander," she stammered.

"You're a sniper! Your job is to kill people!" Cara hissed. "We're talking about people who would rape, murder, and discard your dear _mami_ without a second thought. So answer me again, how many of them do you want to kill?"

A hot glare came into Garces' brown eyes. "I'll kill enough of them, Commander."

"Good," Cara growled. "Ricketts, how many are you going to kill?"

"As many as I need to, Commander, and not one less." Ricketts could have been cast of iron.

Cara turned to Bellamy. "Bellamy?"

"I'm with the Chief, ma'am. We'll kick some pirate arse," he said with a grin. Marines from Ceres already understood what she was saying.

"We'll get it done, Shepard," Fraser said confidently, giving Garces some silent encouragement with a steady hand on her shoulder. "You can count on us."

"I'm glad to hear it," Cara responded tersely.

She turned back to the racks again to get her own gear on. Most of it was Alliance standard-issue, but she'd taken the liberty of procuring some of her own equipment custom from some private manufacturers. Instead of a generic Alliance Kessler Semiautomatic, she'd purchased for herself an Elkoss Edge sidearm equipped with an advanced recoil dampener and a hammerhead rounds system. Her rifle was a specialty weapon; an Armageddon Advanced Assault Weapon, or AAW, from the prestigious Elanus Risk Control Services. She had also the Ariake Tech Katana shotgun, and a standard sniper rifle, even though she didn't expect to have to use the latter with Garces around.

Her armor for this op would be the smoky black Gladiator armor, a choice she preferred over the standard Onyx hardsuit for its combination of stealth abilities and superior damage protection. The color also matched her attitude; she was in no mood for last-minute doubts.

As she fitted the armor around herself like a second skin, Cara almost regretted being so harsh with Garces. But the girl needed to be beaten a little before she'd be tough enough to survive. She hoped she'd beaten her enough, because otherwise the cute little Latina wasn't going to last the day.

She had confidence in the other ground leaders, even--though she was loathe to admit it--in Chief Hyatt. The man was a soldier through and through, despite her doubts of his split-second decision-making. Bradley she was convinced would do fine; he had a very clinical mind, if he was a bit too shy for a Marine. And Haytham, like anyone from Ceres, was just scary to watch, either in combat or in command.

No, any pity she had might as well be saved for what pirates they might meet on the surface of the planet Hera. They were about to be struck by the long arm of the Alliance, mauled by the Teeth of Vengeance.

Swathed in armor from neck to toe, armed with an arsenal of weapons, Cara twisted and tied her ponytail into a bun and fastened on her helmet and she was finally back to where she belonged. She was heartbeats away from re-entering the straight-up, kill-or-be-killed struggle from which she'd been absent for the last six and a half years. Making brawls in the prison yard wasn't the same. This was where she wanted to be, on the front-lines of no man's land.

Six and a half years. A long time to be away. But now she was back, and she'd conquered her demons.

Cara looked at her squad, her Red Team. They were the best she could make them, waiting on her word. She grinned in anticipation. "Let's get ready to rock, Marines!"


	4. Chapter 4

_"Gold Team is away! Repeat, Gold Team is away!"_

Wind, dust, and fog howled through the hangar as Staff Lieutenant Haytham and Gold Team thundered into the open sky in their rover, brake jets firing almost immediately after clearing the _Ardenne_'s hangar bay doors. The tiny metallic cross hanging from her neck felt ice cold against her skin as Cara watched Gold Team plummet to the ground. Every beat of her heart smashed her breast against the inside of her hardsuit, leaving an impression of the medallion in her skin.

Every nerve in her body was firing, she felt like she was moving at a thousand kilometers per hour.

It was this--the energy, the excitement, the exhilaration--that she had missed most during her incarceration. She remembered sitting in the pitch dark of the solitary-housing unit on Penal Colony PN27 for days on end, in her mind trying to recreate that feeling of rapturous anticipation just before a drop; more often than not it was what kept her sane during those excruciating confinements.

_"Approaching drop point 2."_

Red, Blue, and Green Teams would deploy at the same time, but approach the settlement from different directions. Stockholm couldn't risk his ship on the possibility of anti-air defenses until it was confirmed there were none, or if there were, until they were neutralized. The _Ardenne_ would stay well clear of the combat zone unless one of the ground leaders requested air support. Intel couldn't confirm a pirate presence, but Cara had had a gut feeling about the mission from the moment she'd received it. There were pirates in Atreus City, she was sure of it.

Stockholm's voice crackled over the intercom. _"Drop point 2. Good luck ground teams."_

Neither Red, Blue, or Green teams deployed in a rover. All fifteen of them simply leaped out the hangar doors and dropped as fast as gravity would take them.

That first moment falling through the sky was pure joy. The rushing wind stripped away the weight of years of imprisonment and her festering, irreconcilable rage at society, leaving her blissfully clean. For that moment of joyous ecstasy, she was free.

Then she pulled her short-range chute and the moment came to end. The ground rose up to meet her feet and Cara became the iron soldier once again.

She heard her radio crackle as her boots hit the ground with a crunch. _"Red Leader, this is _Ardenne_, do you copy?"_

"I copy, _Ardenne_, over," she responded as she disengaged herself from the chute cords.

In a half-kilometer radius around her, the rest of the ground teams had landed, and as each Marine freed themselves from the encumbering parachutes, the three teams immediately formed up and started moving.

Blue Team would flank east while Green Team swung to the west to encircle Atreus City with Gold Team, the motorized unit, pushing down from the north after completing their first objective. Cara and her Red Team would ram it up the middle from the south, completing the encirclement. Trapped inside that ring of steel, the pirates would pay dearly for their depredation on the human frontier.

Shepard gave Blue and Green Teams time to clear and then waved her Red Team forward. Fraser took point with his assault rifle and heavy kinetic barriers, while Bellamy and his shotgun guarded their six. Cara noted that Corporal Garces kept her sniper rifle primed with safeties off, and also a hand close to the service pistol at her hip. Ricketts was right beside her, ready to cover her for a shot. Cara took up position just behind Fraser, her Armegeddon AAW practically purring in her hands.

They had covered about half a klick when Haytham sounded in over the radio. _"Gold Leader to Red Leader, pumping station is secure."_

"Assessment?"

_"Two guards, ma'am. Batarian. We dealt with them."_

Cara could have sworn the rifle jumped in her hands at the news. There were indeed pirates to kill. It had been too long, and she was ready. "Roger that, Gold Leader. Proceed with primary mission objective--"

_"Red Leader, there's something else."_

"Talk to me, Gold Leader."

_"Batarians, ma'am,"_ he said as if that should make everything obvious, then,_ "Johnson thinks this is storage."_

Cara paused. "Storage" was a cynical military term for "slave housing", and the presence of batarians would certainly indicate the possibility that Atreus City was being used as a storage facility. That added concern for collateral damage, something Cara hated dealing with.

"Understood," she replied to Haytham, then opened a channel to all teams. "Team Leaders, advise you use caution. Target area may be storage, over."

_"Copy that, Red Leader."_

_ "I copy, Red Leader."_

_ "Copy."_

_ "Copy that, over."_

"Hostile presence confirmed. Proceed with primary mission objectives and keep alert for the presence of hostages."

_"Roger that, Gold Leader out."_

"Batarians," she growled to her team.

They each gave her grim nods. "Bloody animals," Bellamy said under his breath.

"Keep quiet," Cara whispered.

Hera's tall grasses swayed in a slight breeze, each resilient stalk springing back into place after the Marines passed, covering their trail and swallowing them into the lush tree-dotted plain that surrounded Atreus City on three sides. But aside from the soughing of the gentle wind, there was very little noise. No rodents scampered underfoot, nor did fowl flit through the air on their hunt for insects. The wilds were still and silent as Red Team passed through.

From time to time Cara glanced at the map on her handheld, noting each team's position relative to the others. Haytham and Gold Team were moving fast in their rover to take up position on the city's northern edge, and both Blue and Green Teams were slowly moving into formation to the east and west.

Bradley radioed in. _"Green Team is in position, over."_

"Roger that, Green Leader. Standby, over."

Sunlight was filtering through a thin layer of cloud cover, giving the thick grassland a textured look as Red Team moved through. Ahead of her, Fraser suddenly cursed and crouched low to the ground. Cara halted.

"What is it?" she asked, scanning the grounds with her AAW.

"Casualty," Fraser replied. She looked over his shoulder and saw her worst fears confirmed.

It was the body of perhaps a thirteen year-old boy, shirtless, with welts and bruises all over his skinny back, his neck tilted so far back that bone jutted through his slashed throat. There was no sign of scavengers or carrion around yet; they had to have missed the killers by minutes.

Staring into the dead boy's vacant eyes, Cara again felt the tug of the silver cross hanging from her neck. Teeth of Vengeance.

"Stay sharp," she whispered to her squad. "Keep your eyes and ears alert for the tangos. They're definitely here."

Ricketts patted his rifle. "Ready and waiting."

Cara again consulted her handheld. They were practically within sight of the settlement just beyond the next grassy knoll ahead. Gold Team was nearly in position, and Blue and Green Teams were standing by. Just another few hundred meters or so. She could already see the smoke and vapor rising in evidence of habitation, could almost make out the sounds of engines and generators, and if she concentrated, the faint ting of tools.

As they crested the final hill, Fraser again dropped to a crouch and gestured her forward. Cara detached the scope from her sniper rifle and crawled forward on her belly to take a look.

Fraser had a single word to comment on what she saw through her scope. "Frack."

Cara was inclined to agree with him. There was a substantial pirate presence in the Atreus City settlement zone; several large trailers were parked in the center, surrounded by disjointed compartments from a cargo freighter, and pre-fab container buildings that bore more than eight different colonial insignias, suggesting they had been stolen by several different pirate groups and gathered here under some common banner. Oddly, though, there were no insignias of known merc groups that Cara could see. Not one single stylized E or inscribed oval. Instead, scrawled over nearly every building was the same snake-like marking.

Cara eyed the prominent gun turrets, and assumed any ground forces would also be armed with rocket launchers of some sort; hardly a comprehensive defense, but potential trouble for her small forces. She motioned to Fraser and they retreated from the top of the hill. She looked to Garces and Ricketts, her spotter and sniper. "You two take up position here, and wait for my orders before you fire a shot. Don't give yourselves away."

Corporal Garces nodded. "Aye aye, ma'am." She slung the shoulder strap over her neck and unfolded the attached bipod on her sniper rifle, taking up a prone position on the hilltop. Ricketts lay beside her with a pair of high-powered binoculars and began scanning the area for important targets.

That left Cara with Fraser and Bellamy. She gave her rifle a pat for vanity's sake. "When we hit them, we're going to hit them hard, throw it all out there and six us some sobs. Fireworks gonna start soon."

Bellamy gave her an enthusiastic grin and cocked his shotgun unnecessarily.

"Blue and Green Teams, begin your approach. You'll need to draw enemy fire and numbers, so pick your targets and keep your heads. Make us proud, boys."

_"Roger that, Red Leader. Beginning our approach,"_ replied Blue Team's Hyatt. A second later, Green Team Leader Bradley checked in. _"We're on the move, ma'am. Proceeding toward primary objective."_

Ricketts gave her the "all clear" signal, and Cara silently waved her men forward, taking the lead down the hillside. They crept along slowly, conscious of the possibility of surveillance from the pirate settlement. At about the halfway point down to the bottom, Cara radioed up to Ricketts and Garces. "Find the corporal a target, Ricketts. You're gonna be the spark for this boom."

Ricketts radioed back. _"There's not much movement, Commander. Wait."_ There was a pause. _"Stand by, acquiring... There he is, the sucker. It's one of them turian tapeworms coming out of the shed. Garces has him in the crosshairs, if he tries to raise an alarm, he's a dead man."_

"Stand by," Cara ordered, switching to the inter-team channel. "Blue and Green Leaders, what's your status?"

_"Blue Team's in range, ma'am. So far no movement."_

_ "Same situation here, Commander. Green Team is in range. No movement."_

"Roger that. Gold Leader, what is your status?"

_"Ready to move in at your command, ma'am."_

Cara, Fraser, and Bellamy were less than a hundred meters from the first buildings and there had not been one peep of movement. But she could hear more sounds now; air filtrations systems and utility pumps inside the buildings, generators cranking up electricity, and somewhere there was a machine shop grinding out tooled metal for some unknown reason. She also smelled the stink of human habitation wafting from slave pens she couldn't see.

A ripple of sudden noises echoed through the jumbled maze of buildings, at the same time, Ricketts' voice crackled in Cara's ear. _"Commander, there's a problem."_

"You lost your target?"

_"He ducked inside again. Now he's having a cigarette with his buddy."_

"So what's the problem?"

_"He's a human."_

Cara started. "Say again?"

_"The pirates, Commander, they're all human."_

Humans? Raiding the frontier for slaves with a few batarian cronies? It was improbable but not impossible to imagine.

"Kill them," Cara snapped into the radio. "Kill them all. Tell the corporal to light it up! Blue and Green Teams, move in! Keep them off those turrets!"

Cara felt rather than heard the first sniper shots ripping through the air, the deep sonic scream chasing a violent impulse that shuddered through her bones. She didn't even need to listen to Ricketts' confirmation of Garces first shot; she knew the corporal had hit her target.

That first shot set off an instant clamor of reaction within the pirate camp. Shouts in several different tongues rang out, doors opened and men bearing all manner of firearms came from all directions, waving their weapons this way and that in a general confusion. She heard orders shouted, and men ran for the turrets at the same time as Blue and Green Teams opened fire from their vantage points.

The two teams of trained Alliance Marines let loose a deadly crossfire at the men trapped in the flanking maneuver, humans mostly, but also turians and batarians. Chief Hyatt had maneuvered his team into the city, closer in than Bradley's Green Team, and from behind cover they unleashed a cutting hail of gunfire that forced the enemy to find cover of their own and managed to destroy two of the closer turrets, further evening the odds by eliminating the heavy artillery.

With the greatest restraint, Cara and her team held their fire and she continued to hold Gold Team in reserve. A small group of pirates had come near but failed to notice them where they crouched behind an old wrecked rover immediately next to a small equipment shed while chaos consumed the camp. The two stocky humans and a grimy turian rushed off to find the fighting and never saw her and the two other Marines.

Cara was about to signal Haytham and Gold Team to move in, crush the pirates with the rover's heavy cannon and gatling gun, when she was blinded by a bright orange flash at the western end of the camp.

"Bradley, Green Team, what in the frack was that?"

There was a brief moment of nothing but static on the channel, then Corporal Hamad answered. _"Pirates are using RPG's, Commander. We took a bad hit, but we're holding for the moment."_

"Hamad, where's Green Leader?"

_"He's dead. Took the first shell right in the chest."_

_Frack!_ "Okay, I'm promoting you to Service Chief; you're now Green Leader. Keep those pirates pinned and away from the turret! Gold Team is on the way."

_"Yes, ma'am."_

Cara gave her two men quick hand signals and they started moving. "Ricketts, you two still busy?"

_"We've been made, Commander. Keep them busy, Garces and I will do what we can."_

"Right. Gold Team, move forward. Provide armor support for Green Team, they've taken casualties."

_"On our way."_

Haytham and Gold Team would roar in from the north, hopefully overwhelming the unexpectedly stiff pocket of resistance facing Green Team. With any luck, the pirates, having been stretched into a weak, divided force by the flanking attack of Blue and Green Teams, would crumble completely.

Finally, Cara abandoned the pretense of stealth, opening up a long burst on the first group of pirates she encountered as she, Fraser, and Bellamy stormed into the city. The hammerhead rounds from her AAW battered a turian's shields and tore through his head, splitting it like an overripe melon. Bellamy unloaded a shotgun blast of corrosive rounds into a turret, severing it from its stand in a crackle of sparks and white hot metal. Fraser loosed a stream of rounds from his assault rifle that cut through a pair of pirates firing on Blue Team's position.

The Armageddon AAW in her hands was as masterful an instrument of death as any Cara had ever carried into a fight. The pirates were beset on all sides, and could offer only paltry resistance as Red Team punched through. The three of them skirted from cover to cover, stray shots caroming uselessly off their shields as they used their weapons to deadly effect. Cara's monstrous rifle boomed satisfyingly in her grip, belching out its armor-pulverizing rounds at an astounding rate.

_"Red Leader, this is Blue Leader. Eastern quadrant is clear."_

"Move to support Green Team, Blue Leader. They're still having some trouble."

A high-pitched whine sounded through the air. Cara recognized the homing signal of an RPG launcher, but it was Fraser who saw it first and shouted the warning. "Hit the deck!"

Cara dove to the ground as a rocket-propelled grenade screamed from the open side of one of the cargo freighter compartments to detonate on a building behind them. The hot wash of flames billowed around her, followed by a shower of shrapnel that drained her shields precipitously. In a flash, she was back on her feet and sprinting for the freighter.

Determined not to let him get another shot at them with the RPG launcher, Cara dove to the side and reached out with her proverbial third arm. The blast hit him just as he pulled the trigger the second time, and the rocket-propelled grenade screamed from its launcher—to detonate into the ceiling straight above the floundering pirate.

The explosion tore open the entire side of the container. Two batarians tried to flee from the flaming wreck, but Cara gunned them down remorselessly with two three-round bursts, shredding their flesh.

_"Green Team reporting in. Western quadrant is clear, over."_

"Roger that." Cara and her team moved forward quickly. She glanced into the freight compartment. "Gold Leader, secure your quadrant. Blue Leader, move into the southern quadrant."

She could hear the first big flash of fighting dying down as the battle transitioned from an open assault to the gritty business of search-and-destroy. Unless, by some miracle, all the forces they'd encountered accounted for all the pirates on the base, those remaining had likely dug themselves into defensible positions and would wait for the Marines to come and try to dig them out.

Clearing all the buildings would take time. Cara figured they might as well get to it.

She stepped inside the container, covering the room with her rifle as Fraser and Bellamy moved up close behind her. There wasn't anything much in this container, mostly just food and supplies, probably stolen from a number of sources, pirated ships or sacked colonies. But lurking amid a stack of preserved meat boxes, Cara eyed another RPG launcher.

After scouring the whole container and finding nothing, they moved to the next. None of them were quite prepared for the sight that awaited them on the other side of the bulkhead.

"Lord in heaven," Bellamy swore, reflexively making the sign of the cross.

The entire container was filled wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling with small cages obviously meant for transporting livestock, and inside each one was a naked, filthy human, most with their bodies contorted in torturous and unnatural positions in order to get them to fit in the cages. No one cried out or made much of a reaction to the Marine's sudden presence; most were beyond seeing or hearing or being aware of much of anything, and the few who did take notice flinched away from them, but only reflexively, not by any conscious thought. The room stank of urine and feces.

Human beings, reduced to animals.

The tiny cross pressed painfully into her skin. "Room's clear. Moving on."

"Commander!" Bellamy nearly shouted.

"We can't just leave them here like this, Shepard," Fraser said in protest.

Apparently not even Ceres could prepare someone for something this. "We're going to find every last one of the sobs who did this, we're going to make them pay. Until we can get the doctors down here, that's the most we can do for these people. Now pull yourselves together, Marines!"

Before Red Team could move out, her radio crackled again. It was Haytham. _"Northern quadrant secure."_

"Did you take prisoners, Gold Leader?"

_"Yes, ma'am. A few of them surrendered once they saw our heavy guns."_

Cara's blood felt about to boil. "Anything on which gang runs this camp?"

_"Affirmative. We asked them a couple questions—they were pretty eager to talk once we started shooting off body parts. This one turian in particular, he said there's a group in Terminus with special holding interests in this outpost, but all we got for a name was something like 'snakehead'. That make any sense to you?"_

It didn't, but Cara wasn't really interested in that. "Kill them all, Haytham. We're not taking prisoners."

_"Commander, are you sure?_

"They all die, Gold Leader. Not one of them lives."

Haytham hardly paused. _"Yes, ma'am."_

Bellamy gave her a nod of approval. "Them aliens I can expect, but it's hard to believe so many humans would do this to one another."

"And that's why we're here.

"Aye, yes indeed."

They stepped out of the freighter segment and found themselves on the impromptu street once again. Blood, debris, and the bodies of dead pirates, be they turian, batarian, or human, lay strewn on the matted grass at the heads of thick rivers of red and blue blood. Just across the boulevard, Blue Team advanced on a shed where four pirates were holed up. It was a short deal; they tossed a few grenades and mowed down the rest. Cara spotted a body that was still twitching and depleted the remains of her thermal clip, riddling the human corpse with holes.

Two big mobile command-centers were perched in the center of the camp. Cara wanted to take them next. She clicked on her radio. "Blue Team, do you copy?"

Hyatt was quick to answer. _"I copy, Red Leader."_

"We're going to clear house at their headquarters. Prepare to move in support, over."

_"Roger that, Red Leader, over."_

Cara slammed home another thermal clip into her Armageddon AAW and got on the move again, creeping toward the two trailers. Red Team approached from the blind side, waiting just behind the corner of the main entrance, while Blue Team moved to crash the doors.

Suddenly, before any of them could react, the doors burst open for an instant, letting a salvo of rocket-propelled grenades through before slamming shut again. Blue Team were caught in the blast, with two of Hyatt's Marines taking near-direct hits.

They didn't need to be told to get to cover. Dragging their wounded, Hyatt and Blue Team beat a hasty retreat. _"Red Leader, we just lost Stolkov and I don't think Sandecker's going to make it. Can you handle this on your own until the other teams get here?"_

"Roger, Blue Leader. Do what you can for Sandecker. Bellamy, Fraser, and I will bring the party." She pointed at the door. "Put a pineapple in there, Fraser!"

The big man nodded and heaved a grenade. The explosion shattered the unarmored door, and the three of them stormed in, firing at anything and everything that moved. Just inside were two humans and a batarian, all armed with RPG launchers. Cara took out the two humans' kneecaps with a burst from her rifle, leaving Bellamy to finish them off with his shotgun. Fraser split the batarian's head open with a point-blank shot from his service pistol.

Inside the main compartment, Cara saw that the pirates had already set countless defensive positions, rearranging the heavy shipping containers and armored barricades in the large open area so that it resembled nothing so much as a killing ground. Hostiles were behind nearly every box and crate, and they met the three Marines with a blistering counter-fire.

Cara ducked back behind the corner and nodded at Fraser again, who obligingly threw another grenade. The high explosive warhead detonated with a satisfying crack, and they charged in.

They had only seconds before the smoke cleared and the pirates once again got their bearings. Cara leaped to one side, taking cover behind a crate, while Bellamy dodged behind a column and Fraser ducked under the lip of dividing counter.

"I think we're gonna need backup for this one, Shepard!" Fraser bellowed as he peppered the side of a container on the upper floor, sticking his rifle out over the edge of his cover.

Cara was about to respond when a dazzling blue flare filled the whole compartment, knifing through the air like a shock wave. Roiling with energy, the blue pulse splashed into the steel column shielding Bellamy. It wrapped around his cover and tore the whole thing loose, blasting him and chunks of the structure clean through the side of the trailer. Just as fast, a similar attack screamed toward Fraser, who only barely managed to dodge it, leaping clear as a heavy crate smashed through the counter and shredded another hole in the wall.

Cara hissed. Biotics.

She knew she had to move fast, before whoever it was decided to take a shot at her. Shouldering her rifle and drawing her sidearm, Cara made a sudden dash forward as she felt the air beginning to rip. Angry tendrils of dark matter exploded where she had been only a second ago.

A batarian poked his head around the corner of a cargo container to take a potshot. Cara sniped him with her pistol and dove for the new cover, finding a quarter of turians waiting for her. Without time to pop them all in the head with her pistol, Cara reacted out of blind instinct, unleashing an unsophisticated push field with her third arm, then gunned them down remorselessly.

"Kinetics, my scarred ass!" Cara heard Bellamy roar. He'd clambered back into the trailer, and laid down an indiscriminate spray of fire that came as close to killing her as it did hitting the unknown biotic. "Come out and fight me face to face, I fracking dare you!"

The Englishman was answered with another vicious biotic pulse, catching him in the chest and flinging him sideways into the steel bulkhead, his rifle firing wildly as he flew and crumpled to the floor, either stunned or dead.

Cara gritted her teeth with rage, but forced herself not to move. She could almost tell where the attacks were coming from, and it took her just a moment to focus her third arm again. Whoever it was, they were almost directly above her, on the second floor of the mobile building.

Twinklings of blue light coalesced around her, the flush of energy she always thought of as her 'third arm'. Cara was not a strong biotic—she put little stock in kineticism in general—but all she needed was to knock her target off-balance to get the opening she needed to finish the job.

Another flash of light from above marked the spot. Cara pounced. A simple biotic blast shot up and away from her, curving to find its target.

What followed was unexpected; her attacker countered with a biotic flurry of their own, trapping her weaker pulse and driving it back at her. Angrily, Cara put more energy into her attack to force it back on track, only for her opponent to do the same. The two biotic fields meshed together into one roiling pulse that drifted even farther away, toward the ceiling. Cara was burning energy faster than a marathon runner, but the entire mass of conflicting forces was dispersing.

Infuriated that her efforts were coming to naught, Cara threw one last gasp of power into her third arm, trying to condense the flailing tendrils of biotic force. And to her utter surprise, it worked. But she was unprepared for the violence of it.

There was a loud crack as the whirling tongues of blue light collapsed into each other, air rushing first outward from the point of inclusion, and then inward, the resulting wind sucking the breath from Cara's lungs as she staggered on her feet, drained. She'd completely lost control of the biotic storm.

The whole trailer groaned, then began to screech and howl as the entire ceiling warped and deformed downward. Some of the larger cargo containers shifted on the floor, the smaller ones began to lift into the air along with pieces of debris and bodies of dead pirates. Fighting against the pull of the fierce wind, Cara stared in horror at the churning blue vortex hanging above her head.

It was a singularity, a black-hole come newly into existence.

She clicked on her radio to warn the rest of her team, but the wind was already prohibitively loud, and she could feel the tug of the infant singularity starting to pull her feet from under her. Hanging on to some of the large containers that were still relatively solid on the floor, Cara pulled herself to the most stable bulkhead she could find and grabbed on, a futile gesture.

The singularity was already consuming the inside of the trailer, atmosphere howling by, cargo containers, debris of every kind, and pirates dead or alive were sucked into the infinitesimal point in space-time where mass possessed infinite density and zero volume. Chunks of the trailer itself were already succumbing to gravity's pull.

Cara had probably only seconds before she could no longer maintain her grip and was sucked into the black hole with everything else. She wondered if she would feel pain when the tidal forces crushed her body out of existence. One finger lost its grip, then a second.

A brutal explosion suddenly rocked the shattered trailer as the unstable singularity gave out, releasing all of its collected mass in one hot, scorching shock-wave that rent in half what little remained of the building. Cara landed in the dirt, her body aching, completely exhausted. Somehow, she managed to stagger to her feet.

The explosion had gouged a crater in the Atreus City site, a ragged bowl filled with debris embedded in the smoking dirt. She couldn't see the rest of the settlement, but what she saw in the immediate area was not encouraging. Not one body was left, living or dead.

She tried her radio, only to find it unusable. "Fraser, Bellamy!" she yelled as loud as she could. It was doubtful either of them were still alive, but she shouted anyway. "Bellam--"

A massive kick to her midsection cut her off. Abandoning her search for survivors, Cara tried to get a visual target on her attacker, but was only able to make out the faint sound of an amused laugh before another blow landed, this one to her jaw. She fell to the ground, groaning in agony.

Her attacker kicked her in the gut, eliciting another hard yelp as Cara tried in vain to curl into the blows. She felt herself grabbed by the neck and forcibly hurled a good dozen meters, landing hard on her back. Dazed, Cara dragged herself to her feet to face her opponent.

A suave asari with deep indigo skin and a supermodel's complexion stood waiting, limned by the blue glow of biotics at the ready. So then this was her kinetic tormentor.

Cara took a step forward, but her foe was already moving, landing a lightning-quick series of blows to her stomach and face. Angrily, she lunged for the asari's throat with a vicious elbow, only to be countered by a flying foot and another double-punch in the gut. The asari's biotic tendencies seemed to give her three times the strength she ought to have, and four times the quickness. In her dazed, almost drunken state, Cara couldn't keep up with the asari's faster moves.

Cara swung, the asari dodged and drove a knee into her stomach. Biotics flaring, she wrapped her hands around Cara's throat and lifted her up off the ground as she choked her at the same time.

The asari's face showed a potent amount of dark humor. "What's the matter? You can make a black hole but you can't compensate with a graviton reduction field? Tsk tsk. If it weren't for me, you might have been killed!" She laughed at her own joke.

Laughing was about the last thing on Cara's mind. She felt like stabbing her two front fingers into the slut's nostrils and breaking the soft cartilage in her nose, but all her leaden arms could do was pry uselessly at the iron grip around her neck.

A bemused expression came over the asari's maddeningly silken face. "It's hard to believe a race so inept, illiterate, and impotent as yours could have accomplished so much. Your species is even weaker than I expected." She clucked her tongue. "You know, after wiping out your sorry little band of heroes, I was planning on having dinner with a great turian general and then bedding his wife, but maybe I should be satisfied with killing you. It would be a favor to you, after all, since my way is the only solution to the human problem."

Cara was losing it. Her vision was filled with purple spots, she could hardly see anything past the asari's infuriatingly perfect features. Her feet dangled ten centimeter from the ground, hanging all the weight of her body and armor on her neck. Unconsciousness and death were only heartbeats away.

"Hold it right there!" The shout came from Ops Chief Hyatt, who was approaching from the side with his two teammates from Blue Team as well as Fraser and Bellamy, their guns at the ready but holding fire like always.

The asari just laughed, and casually held Cara with one hand while the other lifted menacingly toward the Marines, pulsating with biotic energy.

"Don't even think of moving," she warned. Cara wanted to scream at them to shoot the filthy slut, but she couldn't get anything out of her mouth except for a gargling, choking sound, and then even that was cut off. "Just sit real still, throw down your guns, and maybe I won't crush her fragile little skull—with my mind!"

_Shoot her, Hyatt, you lousy piece of space crap! Fracking six the fracking whore!_

Hyatt fired.

It was nothing, really, just one shot from his pistol that bounced harmlessly off the asari's biotic barrier. But she must have been just as surprised as Cara that he'd taken the shot, because it threw her off-balance for a fraction of a second; long enough for Cara's hand to find the handle of her shotgun.

She didn't even bother aiming, just unloaded a blast. It didn't down the asari's barrier, but it rocked her back a few feet, and most importantly, forced her to let go of Cara, who dropped to the ground gratefully while Hyatt and his Marines opened fire all at once.

The asari's face contorted into snarling mask of fury as her biotic barriers cracked under the assault. She managed only one angry blue burst of energy at Fraser before her shield failed completely, and a sniper shot ripped through her head in a shower of shattered bone fragments, brain matter, and a fine red mist of blood. At the top of the crater, Cara saw Corporal Garces casually reloading, Ricketts standing watchfully by.

Cara dropped her shotgun and massaged her throat with both hands. Hyatt crouched over her and offered his hand. "Commander, are you alright?"

She nodded, but declined the hand, preferring to stand under her own power. "Yes, I'm fine, thanks." Cara glanced with some satisfaction at the headless asari lying in a pool of blood just a few feet away. "Well done, Chief. Well done, all of you."


	5. Chapter 5

Lucian Stockholm paced back and forth on the tiny bridge amidst a thick cloud of smoke from the Holmesian pipe clenched firmly in his teeth, eating anxiety and sipping on tension as he awaited word from his ground teams. At _Ardenne_'s helm, keeping the ship in low geosynchronous orbit above the Atreus City site and out of range of possible anti-air emplacements, Sparrow had long since given up trying to wave the smoke away from his nose. It had probably permeated the entire CIC by now, but Stockholm didn't care.

His entire career was riding on this mission, on the ability of Shepard and the other team leaders to get their jobs done. If they failed, if he'd sent his team into a meat grinder the lack of intel couldn't warn them of, then the instant he reported back to Alliance brass, he'd be demoted so fast he wouldn't even have a chance to affect which brand of toilet paper the Alliance used, let alone influence their homeland security policies. In fact, he could probably look forward to taking Shepard's place on Penal Colony PN27. And Shepard—she'd be dead.

The future of the Frontier Security Task Force would be determined by success or failure here. Eternity broke when Cara's voice crackled over the radio. _"_Ardenne_, this is Ground Leader. Mission objectives have been attained."_

Stockholm felt like breaking out and cheering, but restrained himself to breathing a huge, smoke-filled sigh of relief, bending over the comm station, and uttering the four most mundane words possible for his current state of mind: "Understood, Ground Leader. Sitrep?"

Cara sounded tired, but one hundred percent confident. _"We took some casualties subduing a sizable pirate force, sir. Three dead, including Lieutenant Bradley. Four others are seriously wounded. All hostiles have been eliminated and Atreus City is secured, sir."_

"Roger that. Well done. What kind of infrastructure do they in place down there?"

_"Standard stuff, nothing too fancy. Except for the head at the river, which we put in for them, everything's transportable. Several large trailers, some pre-fab sheds, and freighter compartments, I estimate three or four ships' worth."_

"Roger that, Ground Leader. Get your teams together for pickup. We're going to enact scorched earth on everything that's left. They're not going to be using this site again any time soon."

There was a pause on the line, prompting him to wonder if the connection had cut out, but a moment later Cara's voice came over once again. Her tone had dropped a register or two. "_Sir, we have a collateral situation."_

"Collateral?" The one thing he hadn't expected. There was no one out this far in the Traverse; it was one of the most remote worlds from the Alliance that was still within Citadel space. Precisely the reason it was his assignment.

_"Atreus City is storage,"_ Shepard explained._ "This group had its fingers in slave trafficking, We're talking thirty, forty civilian prisoners, all in need of medical attention and I'm not leaving one of them down here, sir._

Stockholm quickly ran the figures through his head. It did not come out looking good. "Commander, _Ardenne_ isn't equipped to take on refugees," he said hesitantly. "We can send our medical team to stabilize the worst, then drop a beacon requesting aid--"

Shepard cut him off with vehemence. _"Are you even listening to what I'm saying? I'm not. Leaving. Anyone. We have the supplies, we'll just have to stretch them a bit. If the infirmary's not big enough then put them up in the mess, or the hangar, or the ship gym. I don't care what you have to do, but we're not leaving these people behind."_

"Commander, listen to me--"

_"No, you listen to me, Lucian! Bring the _Ardenne_ into Atreus City and prepare to take on some extra passengers. We're getting them to Myrmida as soon as possible. Save who you can, remember?"_

The thought finally struck him. He wasn't considering all the potential political implications of what she suggested. News of a pirate outpost destroy and a threat to the human frontier eliminated was certainly good news, but it was nothing especially noteworthy, no matter how much he played it up. In fact, either way, the Admiralty and the Consulate would as likely just ignore his accomplishment as recognize it and elevate his status.

But news of human captives freed from slavery was something he could sell to the public, not only the Alliance public, but the galactic public. Most of the Citadel races disparaged slavery, he might even be able to garner some support from major non-human newswrits. But regardless, reaction among the human general public was practically guaranteed to be enormous. Human captives taken in slaver raids on the frontier were nearly never recovered, thus, this was a big deal.

Throughout his career, Stockholm had never put forth much of a public front. He ignored the media, and they ignored him almost as much as the Admiralty did. Bursting onto the presses with encouraging news of a pirate threat eliminated and human hostages freed from inconceivable cruelty would doubtless go a long way to making him a figure. He would then have additional leverage on the Consulate.

Case in point: The speediest possible recovery those human captives would foster a positive public image, and could even be the catalyst for a move to higher places in his career.

Stockholm took a long drag from his pipe and exhaled slowly. "Roger that, Ground Leader. _Ardenne_ is on approach. ETA ten minutes. I'll have Dr. MacKay and a medical team standing by."

_"Thank you, sir,"_ Shepard replied with relief and gratitude plain in her voice.

Sparrow set the _Ardenne_ down at the small airfield, little more than a wide strip of grass reserved for further development, the old ship shuddering to rest on its antiquated landing gear. As Stockholm promised, Doctor Formann MacKay and the entire infirmary staff were on hand in the hangar when the bay doors opened and the cargo ramp extended.

Outside, Stockholm was able to see firsthand the extent of the pirate camp that had been established at the Atreus City site, where a sizable colony was once to have stood, proudly bearing the banner of Humankind among the stars. What was there in its stead was a hideous scab on the earth. Buildings and re-purposed cargo containers, pieces of component freighters and the massive mobile command units, all spread out in a haphazard fashion that defied all concepts of order and aesthetic appeal.

Shepard assured him all the pirates were dead—a minor annoyance, as he'd have preferred to take a few prisoners for interrogation, but that could be handled—and he certainly believed her. Bodies lay in loose piles, mostly shoved up against the buildings so the Marines could move about; bodies of turians, batarians, but shockingly, most were humans. Shepard had done her job well.

Lieutenant Haytham approached Stockholm and the medical team. He snapped a quick salute. "Admiral, sir!"

"At ease, Lieutenant," he responded.

"Lieutenant, where are the patients?" asked Dr. MacKay.

Haytham pointed with his thumb. "Just a little further in. We pulled some of the bodies out of the pirates' barracks and put most of the poor sobs in there to wait until you showed up. Don't worry, Doc, Johnson and the rest of my team are in there watching 'em."

"Oh, that's good," MacKay replied. "Could you point me in the right direction then?"

Stockholm nodded. "I want you and your men to help the doctors, Lieutenant."

Haytham saluted again. "Yes, sir!"

Rather than stay and watch the doctors at their work, Stockholm trudged farther into the camp, soon finding Gunnery Chief Fergus Bellamy and Shepard's Red Team patrolling, though the Commander was not with them.

All four Marines stood and saluted. "Admiral, sir!"

"At ease. Where's the Commander, Chief?" he asked.

"She's waiting for you at the main building, Admiral," replied the Englishman. "Don't worry, sir, we've combed the whole place twice to ferret out all pockets of resistance. I can personally assure you, there's no pirates left in this place."

Stockholm held out his hand. "Well, lead the way, Chief."

"Aye aye, sir! You three, continue your patrol."

As Bellamy led him through the carnage, Stockholm noticed that the tip of his right ear was missing, as well as a swatch of hair along the side of his head that looking like it had been burned.

"You alright, soldier?"

The Marine cocked his head. "Sorry?

"I said are you alright?"

"Yes, sir, Admiral!"

Stockholm pointed. "Well, what happened to your head?"

"Oh, you mean this?" Bellamy pointed to his ear. "Caught the wrong side of a biotic blast, sir. A few biotic blasts, actually. Don't worry, it's nothing serious."

Biotics. That word had dire meaning. "You ran into kinetics here?"

Bellamy nodded again. "Yes, sir. At their main headquarters—or, heck, what we _thought_ was their main headquarters—there was this asari sob who I'd reckon was the one running this whole operation. She had a little biotic bout with the Commander, and I kind of got in the way." Bellamy frowned. "Didn't Shepard tell you about this, sir?"

A litany of troubling thoughts passed through Stockholm's mind. "No, she didn't."

"Why the heck not?"

"I don't know," he answered. But he intended on finding out. Something else Bellamy said gave him pause. "Wait, go back. You said this asari had a 'biotic bout' with the Commander? What does that mean, soldier?"

"Uh, you know, where one of them throws some dark energy, then the other one throws some back, that sort of thing?"

Something was definitely wrong with that picture, something simple. "Shepard isn't a biotic."

The Marine shrugged. "What can I say? Shepard was running around throwing all sorts of freaky blue stuff around. I just kinda assume that's the sort of thing makes you a biotic. But who knows, maybe I'm wrong."

Stockholm's mind raced. Shepard with kineticism was a possibility he'd never figured into his plans. In fact, it could cause numerous problems for his Frontier Security Task Force; he needed _less_ government scrutiny, not more. A biotic Commander Shepard could put everything he'd accomplished in jeopardy.

"I need to speak to Commander Shepard, right now."

Bellamy seemed to get his drift. "I'll take you to her now, sir."

* * *

As she'd feared, intelligence gathering was a pain. Inside the one main command building still left standing, most of the computer systems had been wiped clean by some of the more practical-minded pirates. The first ones inside were Hyatt's Blue Team, who had managed to capture a turian technician who was in the process of destroying OSD's.

Shepard stared at his corpse on the floor. "Snakehead. That's all we got?"

Close by, Hyatt was trying to recover some erased data from a terminal. "Technically, it was 'head of a snake', but yes, ma'am. That's all we got from him. He must have swallowed a pill or something. All we got was a name."

So they were fanatics, then. Certainly some of them were, since hired guns weren't in the business of committing suicide to prevent interrogation. Which all meant they were dealing with not only a dirty gang with its fingers in human trafficking, but one that doubled as a terrorist cell. She definitely wanted to know more about this gang.

On one level it was a pity they didn't have any live prisoners, but she'd given the order for no prisoners taken and she wasn't sorry for it.

The name Snakehead gnawed at her. It was disturbing on an obscure level she couldn't quite pinpoint. "Snakehead, are you sure?"

Chief Hyatt nodded. "Four years of alien languages in the academy, two additional years specializing in turian dialects. I'm ninety-nine point eight percent sure. Don't know why they'd pick a turian name for an asari-run gang crewed by humans and batarians, but that's what he said. 'Snakehead' or 'head of a snake'."

Medusa came to mind.

"Okay, thanks. See what you do about recovering some of these OSD's."

Hyatt went back to his work, and Shepard left the body of the dead turian to go outside, where spied Bellamy approaching with Admiral Stockholm in tow. She ran up to meet them.

"Admiral!"

"Shepard, I need to speak to you. Right now."

"Sir?"

Stockholm stared at the crater ringed by the skeleton of the other building, his face pale with trepidation, like he already knew exactly what had taken place there that would explain the shortage of attendant debris. "This is where it happened, then?" His face hardened into a disciplinary glower. "Inside. Let's talk in private, Shepard."

She had no idea what could be the cause of his sudden mood shift, but sensing he was in no mood to be diverted with questions, Cara shrugged and led him back into the building, to an office in the back. Stockholm shut the door behind them and paced, saying nothing until Cara could stand it no longer.

"What's this about, Admiral?" she asked. "The mission was a success; we minimized casualties, eliminated the hostile, and rescued prisoners." Still he said nothing.

"Look, I don't know what else you expected out of this," she said angrily. "We lost some people, but things still went a frack of a lot better than we had any right to hope for."

Her argument seemed only to further incite his foul mood. Stockholm was not appeased by her rationale. "What's this about Bellamy telling me how you got into a scrap with an asari? I can see from the wreckage out there that it was little more than just a tussle—that was a singularity, dangit!"

So that was it, then. Cara crossed her arms. "Yes it was." She knew what he was getting at, but asked anyway. "What's your point?"

"You lied to me, Shepard. You never told me you were a biotic."

"That's not your business, Stockholm," Cara snapped. "And I'm not a biotic."

Stockholm crossed his own arms. "Bellamy says you are."

"Bellamy needs to mind his own fricking business." She glared. "Whether or not I prescribe to the Church of Kineticism is of no concern to the Alliance," she added.

"It's my business if you get yourself killed because of it," the Admiral retorted.

"Well, I didn't, did I? I seem to still be standing here." Of course, it felt like she had an excavation crew jackhammering inside her skull and her stomach was trying squeeze up her throat. But she left that out, especially given that it was nothing more serious than a mild hangover compared to some of the other things she'd soldiered through before.

Stockholm sighed in exasperation, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Shepard, do you know how many rules we're breaking—not bending, breaking—just to keep this unit afloat? Now, we're lucky enough to have you as our sole controversy, and I've been able to quash most of those talks." He resumed his nervous pacing. "But if words gets to the Parliamentary Subcommittee for Tans-Human Studies that we've aided and abetted an unlicensed biotic who falsified her papers to hide her status from military authorities, well, you know how sensitive the subject of biotic licensing is back home. If that words gets out then we lose every shred of credibility we might have ever gained. Heck, Shepard, if this gets out, I could be forced to resign my post and this whole task force is dissolved. At the very best case, we'll get saddled with so much red tape that getting anything done will be nigh impossible."

Cara listened incredulously. "Lucian, is this about me getting myself killed or me putting you in an uncomfortable political situation?"

"Frack and double-frack, Shepard!" Stockholm swore. "You never told me you were a biotic!"

"I don't consider myself a biotic, _Admiral_, so it wasn't relevant for me to tell you," Cara said coolly. "Frankly, I don't tell you a lot of things about my life, because it's none of your business."

Stockholm glared balefully at her. "So then this trust thing we've been working on for the past few months?"

Cara shrugged. "We're still on that road, Stockholm, we just haven't gotten there yet. Who knows, maybe I would have eventually told you about my biotic abilities. Point is, you hired me because I can kill. I don't think it much matters how, just that I can. Everything else beyond that we'll have to work on. And as for THS, just make sure the word doesn't get out. I should think someone who can pull a convicted criminal out of prison and wipe her record clean should have no trouble keeping a few unconfirmed rumors from seeing light of day. If not, I can convince Bellamy to keep his mouth shut."

Stockholm was angry she'd kept this from him, she understood that. But he was also worried for her, and that irked Cara to no end. The one thing she didn't need was to be worried over.

"We should just get you licensed, Cara. I can get it done with minimum fuss and keep it quiet," he offered.

"No way. They'll put a chip in me and start recording my periods and bowel movements. Frack if that's going to happen to me. I don't need a biotic crutch, Admiral, and if Bellamy or anyone else is thinking of talking, I can be pretty persuasive when it comes to changing people's minds. This will never reach THS and you won't have to worry about it affecting you or this unit."

Stockholm sighed and pulled out his pipe. "I hope you're right, Shepard."

"I am right, Lucian. Listen, forget about this biotic business. You have what you need. Our success here is proof of both the need for and the practicality of a frontier security task force. You'll get your backing, and then we can really get to work."

Stockholm lit his pipe and took a big puff. "You're probably right. I guess I'm just a little paranoid about losing my best soldier because of a freak biotic accident that could have been avoided with proper training."

Cara knew he was referring to the singularity she'd unwittingly created inside the trailer. The asari's jibe came readily to mind—there was no way was she going to admit to him that it had nearly killed her. "The Alliance has other biotics at its disposal, Admiral. Enlist them."

He nodded. "Thanks to you and your teams, perhaps I can. I'll see about getting some biotic assistance when we get back to T9, after I've made my report."

"Good." Cara gestured at the door. "Well, if there's nothing else, Admiral, I have to prepare Lieutenant Bradley's body for transport."

"Of course." As she was leaving, he caught her arm. "Oh, one more thing. When we get back to T9, I think we should have that wrestling match."

He seemed to have forgotten their brief altercation, so she gave him a grin. "Wouldn't you like that, now? You blow some minds at Arcturus first, Lucian, then I'll wrestle you into the ground."


	6. Chapter 6

"We really should inform the Admiral..." protested the doctor. But Cara was insistent.

"No, you should definitely not tell the Admiral I was here."

Dr. Formann MacKay wrinkled his forehead in confusion. He wasn't used to breaching protocol, too bad for him. Cara couldn't help it; she didn't need anyone, least of all Admiral Stockholm, to know how badly that asari's biotic attack had injured her.

Cara sat on one of the counters, forcing the doctor to squint up at her through a pair of medical glasses. Balding, his shiny pate reflected the sterile glow of the infirmary lights as he fidgeted with the hem of his stereotypical white lab coat.

"Commander Shepard, from what you've told me of your symptoms—the mild to severe migraines, bowel discomfort, difficulty focusing vision and sensitivity to light, not to mention your fever—this is a classic case of heavy substance poisoning. I had Bellamy in here earlier for just the same thing. I don't think you realize how serious--"

Cara swatted away his hand when he tried to feel her forehead again, for about the tenth time. "No, Doc, I know it's serious. This isn't my first time around the block, I know what my body does and I can handle it. Now, there's no reason for Stockholm or anyone else on this ship to worry about how I'm feeling. I just need some meds so I don't frickin' throw up in the middle of the CIC!" When the _Ardenne_'s ancient engines cranked up to speed, the sudden and poorly dampened acceleration had nearly brought out the entire contents of her stomach.

It wasn't just the pounding in her head that made it seem like her brain was growing in size to where it would become too large for her skull, but the nausea had gotten progressively worse after leaving Hera. The symptoms the doctor described were all associated with exposure to a heavy substance, element zero. Or, in this case, it was the amalgamation of dark forces known as biotic energy, one of the many derivatives of EZ, doing its work to rip apart the very molecular structure of her body. Even a non-lethal exposure had consequences; no one simply walked away from a biotic attack, not even her.

"I just need some meds, Doc, and I need them without a report. I'm not going to need supervision just from being molecularly molested by a biotic whore. Believe me, I've had worse."

The doctor breathed a heavy sigh and turned to his cabinet. "This wasn't full-contact exposure to raw element zero, I hope?"

"Nope. She just tried to scrunch me into a ball the size of an atom, pretty normal for an asari. I haven't been snorting the stuff, if that's what you're asking." Cara left out the part where it was she who had caused the freak biotic singularity. The effect was the same, so the how wasn't exactly relevant for the situation.

MacKay looked relieved. "Well, if you had been directly exposed to element zero, I'd have no choice but to make a report to THS and recommend you for observation, but if it was just dark matter, then I should have some EHO to take care of your symptoms." Doctor MacKay turned back to her after a minute scrounging for the right medication. "Field strength enzohydroxy, it's a molecular stabilizer, it should help clear up your symptoms. Take these by mouth with plenty of water, two times a day for the next four days, and don't take any tranquilizers or other painkillers."

Cara grabbed the bottle of pills. "Yeah, I know. Muddled vision, dizziness, possible loss of consciousness. If things get bad I'm looking at damage to the central nervous system, or even a fatal stroke. Oh, and caffeine sends me on an acid trip—yeah, I've been here before, Doc. Thanks."

MacKay nodded. "It's my pleasure, Shepard. Oh, by the way, what's Barbarossa?"

"What?" Cara had never even heard of the name, except perhaps way back in high school. She couldn't see what possible relevance it had to anything.

The doctor scratched his head. "Barbarossa. The name's been tickling me something awful. One of the patients we picked up at Hera said it in his sleep."

Cara shrugged. "I've got no idea, Doc. Minds as screwed-up as that can come up with just about anything, doesn't necessarily mean anything. But who knows, maybe the shrinks on Myrmida will make some sense of it."

"Eh, not my area of expertise. Well, I'll see you later, Commander. Take care."

* * *

From the start, the crew of the small merchant vessel had no chance. Their first mistake was to buy the phony distress signal, their second to take her on board. Killing humans was ridiculously easy, armed or not. She'd never graduated the elite school of training to make commando, but that didn't mean she was anything less than deadly with her naturally-endowed gifts. After slaughtering the ship's security team, subduing the rest of the crew was simply a matter of setting a few examples.

Maya laughed at the woman's screams as her biotic reave sliced her body apart into blood-slick chunks and pale guts. Neither she nor her men had any use for the officers of _MSV Delhi_, so there was no reason to keep them alive. There were still plenty of crew left for them to use. The three humans and one batarian on her own crew, males all around, were especially interested in enjoying the female crew members of the _Delhi_.

Maya licked coppery blood from her fingers and strolled for the bridge.

Usually, she took her own pleasure from captives before dispatching them, but she was on edge, and when she was on edge it was blood and not sex that was her drug of choice. _MSV Delhi_ was the third ship she and her small crew had hit in the last week, just one of a series of seemingly random targets with insignificant cargo of little worth. None of the ships they'd hit recently were the least bit challenging to take over and carried nothing of real value to her group.

The whole operation seemed pointless, and that raised her hackles because nothing Haliat did was pointless.

Goddess curse that Ilanos Haliat. If Maya had had her way, she would be running more slave runs in the Skyllian Verge and fewer ransackings of glorified postal carriers to no apparent purpose. But she did what Haliat told her to do.

Close to the bridge, she found Urske, the unruly batarian troublemaker from Omega, leaning casually against a closed door. She could hear the men inside enjoying the charms of the _Delhi_'s female crew members.

"Urske, you set some boys aside for me and Sister, right?" she asked.

The batarian nodded. He seemed to hold no interest for the orgy going on behind the closed door. "I did my best," he replied. "But this was a dry selection. Only one or two really looked young enough. Then again, it's hard to tell with humans. No guarantees."

Maya was disappointed. At best she'd get a quick pop, but nothing really worthwhile. _Just like everything else about this job—nothing worthwhile._

Human males matured far too rapidly, as far as she was concerned.

Maya raised an eyebrow. "I'm surprised you aren't joining the fun with the other guys, Urske. You should be enjoying yourself."

The batarian shrugged. "Human women bore me, no spirit in them at all. Even watching them die is hit or miss, unless you get really creative." He smudged a finger through the blood smeared all over her armor. "Hot-dang, this looks like it was fun."

Hardly. It had barely satisfied her, but she didn't tell Urske that. He would just make one of his clumsy advances and she'd have to turn him down. Once, she'd accidentally killed one of her own crew turning down an invitation to his bed, which was annoying because then she'd had to find a replacement engineer.

Maya quickly brushed past the batarian and entered the bridge. Much of the command console was splattered with blood and brain matter from the pilot, whose head she'd smashed with a biotic blast. She opened a communications channel on the specified frequency to reach Haliat's people. She would signal and they would send another ship to re-crew and and appropriate this vessel, take its payload for use by Haliat's organization, and pay her for her services, wasted as they were.

She was surprised when Haliat's hologram suddenly appeared on the console. He never communicated with her directly when she was out in the Traverse doing his dirty work.

"Haliat, I'm pleased to report that the job went smoothly, although I must admit I am getting tired of--"

"_Don't whine about being 'tired' of your assignment, Ibsehn. That's not why I'm here, this has nothing to do with your contract._"

Maya frowned, confused. "What? What's this about, Haliat?"

Ilanos Haliat was a very powerful criminal lord in the Terminus Systems. He had dozens of independent groups like Maya's allied with his larger syndicate, all brought together under the banner of profit, the promise of riches. He delivered very well to his own. His easily ranked among the top four most influential crime syndicates in Terminus, and Maya was fortunate enough not to have to call him an enemy.

Big and powerfully built, he had the look of a barbarian about him—not hard for a human—and an ostentatious smirk permanently affixed to his face that was designed and refined for the express purpose of making everyone he talked to feel like a clod of dirt beneath his boot. That treatment applied to everyone, even the ones he made incredibly wealthy.

He was never satisfied, nothing could placate him, and he had his fingers in almost everyone's game. Haliat commanded her respect by his strength at arms and his ability to maintain such an empire of corruption when he went to such lengths to make it abundantly clear that he cared about no one but himself. If they ever met face to face, however, Maya would have no trouble tearing him apart with her biotics. Which was precisely why they would never meet face to face.

"_You and the whore on Hera promised me a shipment in time for the universal, Ibsehn. Well, the date came and went, and your fracking shipment never arrived. What the frack happened?_"

Snakehead wasn't a gang, not really, not compared to the other mercenary groups that by and large controlled the Terminus Systems. It was her brainchild and a fun way to pass the time, but Maya knew she couldn't go up against the larger gangs; that was part of the reason why she'd joined forces with Haliat. The camp at Atreus City on the Alliance world Hera was an ambitious project, but the asari she'd left in charge was one of the most capable people she'd ever dealt with. She wouldn't have simply dropped something like this, not when it directly involved Haliat.

That left only one explanation: Hera had been purged. But she couldn't admit that to Haliat.

"Oh, I'm sure they're simply having mechanical troubles and can't radio out. Only a minor delay."

Haliat laughed as if that were the funnest thing in the world. "_Do you think I'm stupid, Ibsehn? The shipment never arrived because the pickup vessel tried to land at your little play-camp and found a few piles of half-burnt bodies and not one building left standing._" Haliat shoved something into the projection transmitter. It was a head. "_They picked this up. Look familiar? I thought she looks a lot like the little whore you put in charge of that place, but that's just me._"

There was no doubt, the severed head with the grotesque hole in her face belonged to her associate, the one whose responsibility had been to keep things running smoothly on Hera. Maya panicked, tried to stall. "Maybe the Blue Suns--"

_"The Blue Suns?_" Haliat laughed again. "_Ibsehn you are as dumb as a rock. The Blue Suns are in T'Lohk's camp—for now, anyway. You know if they wanted to launch an opening salvo against our operations, I'd already have a bullet in my head, so it's obviously not Aria's doing. You and your pathetic little operation 'Snakehead' aren't even a pimple on her naturally-biotic ass. It was the Alliance."  
_ "You mean, the Human Alliance?"

"_No, I mean the hanar flower-picking alliance._" Haliat's lip curled with scorn. "_Of course the Human Alliance!_"

"It can't be," Maya protested. "The Alliance never patrols that deep in the Traverse; that's the whole reason we chose Hera! There's nothing in that region important enough to warrant a military presence. It's entirely safe territory to run business, you said so yourself!"

"_Sweetheart, it ain't safe no more. There is no doubt as to who's responsible. My man on Myrmida confirmed it._"

Myrmida, the storied Alliance medical colony, had seen more than its share of piracy victims cross through the doors to its enormous hospital facilities. It had the best doctors in Alliance space, and would invariably be the destination for slave shipments stolen in transit by authorities. Haliat found it useful to know when the Alliance had a knee-jerk reaction to probings of their territory, so he made an effort to ensure that his man on Myrmida was always beyond reproach. His word in this matter could not be doubted. Captured slaves turning up on Myrmida was as good as proof of presence.

But Maya sensed that the missing shipment was not Haliat's main concern. Slaves were replaceable by nature, and he had almost no use for her services in the first place, so he could not be upset over the destruction of the Snakehead camp on Hera.

"What's your point, Haliat? This sounds like my problem, not yours."

"_It's my problem because you and yours are in the unfortunate position of being privy to certain details about Barbarossa. If the Alliance stole the shipment, it goes without saying that they've combed over your puny little camp and found something. We've spent years laying the groundwork. If your stupidity sets back Barbarossa..."_

"I'm not stupid, either, Haliat," Maya shot back. "The only person who knew anything of import about Barbarossa is now a head on your desk. You know I only entrust such details to other asari. The most the Alliance will have is a rumor, at best."

Haliat crossed his arms. "_You'll forgive me if I don't take you at your word. If you want to keep your dumb little group in my good graces, you find the Alliance ship that did this, and you make sure they don't know anything."_ He sneered at her as if to say, 'I am better than you and I always will be'.

_ "Aria T'Lohk would make an example of you"_--true, though Aria T'Lohk would probably not treat her like an STD--_"but I'm going to give you a chance to make it up to me. I don't want so much as a word about Barbarossa heard in Alliance space. Am I understood?_"

Maya glowered. "Yes, Haliat. I'll be on that right away."

"_See that you are. And if it takes too long, if my men start to hear so much as a twinkling of a rumor in Alliance space, well, I'm sure sex-murders are commonly accepted in your culture. They'll see the differences, won't they?" _Haliat's hologram clicked off, leaving Maya to stew in rage.

She hated that man. She hated humans and men in general, but Haliat was the worst. He loved to humiliate her by comparing her harmless diversions to the sexual deviance of an ardat yakshi, the most vile insult possible for an asari. Humans lacked sophistication, like her and other asari, which was part of what made it so easy to just barge into their minds and take what she wanted. It was their own fault for being so fragile that half of the time her mates ended up dimwits and catatonics. She knew what she wanted and she took it, they just got in the way.

But if she ever got her hands on Haliat, Maya swore that the things she did to that man would make an ardat yakshi jealous.

Maya felt like more blood, and she would have it. She would find the Alliance ship that had destroyed all her hard work, and then she would start redefining the way she experienced pleasure, one scream at a time.

* * *

Stockholm was a man of politics so far as they served his purposes, he had little use for over-bloated committees and senatorial hearings, preferring to deal with individuals rather than corporate identities. Still, even when bypassing the typical bureaucracy, there were a number of individuals he would have to deal with, the movers and shakers of Alliance politics. The most important of these were, first Admiral Steven Hackett COMTURFLT (Commander, Arcturus Fleet), and Admiral Yuri Mikhailovich, the two most influential military figures in the Alliance; after them Ambassador Udina and several members of Parliament, and certainly not the least of them, the THS subcommittee itself.

But at the moment, the only person he need deal with was the Ambassador himself, everyone else could wait.

Donnel Udina appeared as a hologram in Stockholm's private office. Due to a local dust storm, the monochrome transmission was rough and choppy, his voice marred with static. _"Admiral Stockholm, I recently received your report on this ill-advised mission to Hera,"_ the Ambassador said sternly. _"You are in gross violation of military protocol, Admiral, not to mention meddling in political affairs by launching an all-out assault on a world to which the Alliance holds no colonial, military, or developmental claim."_

Stockholm leaned back in his chair, toying with his unlit pipe. "You know, Ambassador, as long as we're speaking plainly, I seem to recall being handed this position by you and the Admiralty. What's the matter? I'm only doing what you commissioned me to do."

Udina could not answer that. The papers were filed, thin though they were. Stockholm _was_ assigned to this unit.

He lit his pipe and took a puff. "So what I want is simple; you're going to give me reinforcements."

Udina bristled. _"I don't know what you're smoking from that pipe of yours, Rear Admiral. Yours is a rogue operation not sanctioned by the Alliance, kept together by regulatory loopholes. Any green Internal Affairs investigator would have no trouble ripping your claim to shreds."_

Alliance Internal Affairs could be vicious, that much was true. It was the risk Stockholm had run, but he wasn't worried, because he had an edge on the politicians. Not worried in the slightest.

"Going to Internal Affairs would be a mistake, Ambassador," he countered.

Udina creased his brow. _"And how is that?"_

"Your name is splashed all over this task force, Donnel. You commissioned it, you put me in command; any investigation won't fail to bring that up. And then there's the matter of public reaction. You want to talk about violation of protocol? How about dissolving the military unit that freed the first human slaves in over seven years. The story should hit the Citadel in only a few hours.

_"You went _public_?"_ Udina was livid. _"Admiral, do you have any idea the political--"_

"The feel-good story, pretty potent political capital, if I say so myself. Now what do you think is going to happen when the public hears about your campaign to take down the man who made such a remarkable rescue possible? We've suffered these attacks on our frontier for too long, and the public knows it. They'll support me, you know they will."

Udina sighed, as if conceding the point. _"Politically, increased human military presence in the Traverse is unjustifiable, barring a full-scale war with the Terminus Systems."_ He shrugged. _"But it may be possible to set a small diversion of resources under your command, as long as you keep to the express purpose of purging this troubling pirate threat from our borders. I can't afford to have you waging a land-grab campaign, Citadel politics are not as clear-cut as you military people are so keen to believe. I will see what I can do, but don't make more of this than it is, Admiral."_

Stockholm couldn't help but smile. "Have you ever known me to do such things?"

Udina ignored him. _"You can have your Frontier Security Task Force, Admiral. Consider it legitimized. But make no mistake: I cannot be connected with you in any way, you are in this alone. Isolation is incumbent to our agreement."_

"I understand, Ambassador."

The hologram clicked off.

They would take care of the formalities—the papers, the forms, the endless reports—later. At least for the moment, his arrangement with the Ambassador was proving quite lucrative indeed.

There was just one more person he had to contact. Stockholm put in another call and a new hologram appeared, this one a spindly, square-jawed man with the eyes of a vulture.

_ "Stockholm,"_ he said in a toneless voice. This vacant disposition was legendary. It was said of Yorick Wolff, Chairman of the Parliamentary Subcommittee for Trans-Human Studies, that a quartet of the most lascivious and sensual asari Consorts could not interest him. The man was ruthless.

"Thank you for answering on such short notice. I need to ask you a favor..."


	7. Chapter 7

Stockholm was a man of politics so far as they served his purposes, he had little use over-bloated committees and senatorial hearings, preferring to deal with individuals rather than corporate identities. Still, even when bypassing the typical bureaucracy, there were a number of individuals he would have to deal with, the movers and shakers of Alliance politics. The most important of these were, first Admirals Steven Hackett and Yuri Mikhailovich, the two most influential military figures in the Alliance, after them Ambassador Udina and several members of Parliament, and certainly not the least of them, the THS subcommittee itself.

But at the moment, the only person he need deal with was the Ambassador himself, everyone else could wait.

Donnel Udina appeared as a hologram in Stockholm's private office. Due to a local dust storm, the monochrome transmission was rough and choppy, his voice marred with static. _"Admiral Stockholm, I recently received your report on this ill-advised mission to Hera,"_ the Ambassador said sternly. _"You are in gross violation of military protocol, Admiral, not to mention meddling in political affairs by launching an all-out assault on a world to which the Alliance holds no colonial, military, or developmental claim."_

Stockholm leaned back in his chair, toying with his unlit pipe. "You know, Ambassador, as long as we're speaking plainly, I seem to recall being handed this position by you and the Admiralty. What's the matter? I'm only doing what you commissioned me to do."

Udina could not answer that. The papers were filed, thin though they were. Stockholm _was_ assigned to this unit.

He lit his pipe and took a puff. "So what I want is simple; you're going to give me reinforcements."

Udina bristled. _"I don't know what you're smoking from that pipe of yours, Rear Admiral. Yours is a rogue operation not sanctioned by the Alliance, kept together by regulatory loopholes. Any green Internal Affairs investigator would have no trouble ripping your claim to shreds."_

Alliance Internal Affairs could be vicious, that much was true. It was the risk Stockholm had run, but he wasn't worried, because he had an edge on the politicians. Not worried in the slightest.

"Going to Internal Affairs would be a mistake, Ambassador," he countered.

Udina creased his brow. _"And how is that?"_

"Your name is splashed all over this task force, Donnel. You commissioned it, you put me in command; any investigation won't fail to bring that up. And then there's the matter of public reaction. You want to talk about violation of protocol? How about dissolving the military unit that freed the first human slaves in over seven years. The story should hit the Citadel in only a few hours."

_"You went _public_?"_ Udina was livid. _"Admiral, do you have any idea the political--"_

"The feel-good story, pretty potent political capital, if I say so myself. Now what do you think is going to happen when the public hears about your campaign to take down the man who made such a remarkable rescue possible? We've suffered these attacks on our frontier for too long, and the public knows it. They'll support me, you know they will."

Udina sighed, as if conceding the point. _"Politically, increased human military presence in the Traverse is unjustifiable, barring a full-scale war with the Terminus Systems."_ He shrugged. _"But it may be possible to set a small diversion of resources under your command, as long as you keep to the express purpose of purging this troubling pirate threat from our borders. I can't afford to have you waging a land-grab campaign. Citadel politics are not as clear-cut as you military people are so keen to believe. I will see what I can do, but don't make more of this than it is, Admiral."_

Stockholm couldn't help but smile. "Have you ever known me to do such things?"

Udina ignored him. _"You can have your Frontier Security Task Force, Admiral. Consider it legitimized. But make no mistake: I cannot be connected with you in any way, you are in this alone. Isolation is incumbent to our agreement."_

"I understand, Ambassador."

The hologram clicked off.

They would take care of the formalities—the papers, the forms, the endless reports—later. At least for the moment, his arrangement with the Ambassador was proving quite lucrative indeed.

There was just one more person he had to contact. Stockholm put in another call and a new hologram appeared, this one a spindly, wedge-faced man with the eyes of a vulture.

_ "Stockholm,"_ he said in a toneless voice. This vacant disposition was legendary. It was said of Yorick Wolff, Chairman of the Parliamentary Subcommittee for Trans-Human Studies, that a quartet of the most lascivious and sensual asari Consorts could not interest him. The man was ruthless.

"Thank you for answering on such short notice. I need to ask you a favor..."

* * *

Cara didn't wait around with the rest of the men for news. She had no doubts whatsoever that the Admiral would get it done, so waiting with bated breath was a waste of time. Bellamy brought out his antique compact disc player and listened to an ancient group named after insects singing about yellow submarines with some of the others, and Cara went to the cold storage room to sit with the bodies of Lieutenant Bradley, Private 1st Class Gregory Stolkov, and Corporal Julia Sandecker, the three Marines who had died in the assault on Atreus City. They were being shipped back to their families for proper funerals befitting the outstanding soldiers of humankind that they were.

Cara had lived to see a lot of friends die, Bradley was just the latest. But she didn't cry over death.

Her first friend to die was a highschool girl friend named Camille. She'd been a sensation with her flaming red hair, and just picked the wrong day to drink and drive. The next was a classmate in the academy, Harrison. She had a brief romantic fling with him, before he died in a freak training accident.

It was after his death that she learned the only acceptable emotion when dealing with such loss was anger, and that had worked out pretty well for her so far. It wasn't self-pity or angst that had gotten her through six years of brutal military prison, it was anger.

Anger blocked everything, whether it be uncontrollable emotional distress or the pain of an impromptu surgery without anesthetic. The only drawback was it made her not exactly the most sociable person to be around until she could work it off. In prison, finding fights was not a problem unless she was confined to solitary. Here, though, Cara didn't need the constant threat of rape with a foreign object hanging over her head to find a reason to work off some aggression. With the com-sim, she could pick a fight whenever she wanted.

Decked out with a training rifle and armor colored an impractical shade of blood red, Cara ran an urban warfare simulation, firing at the projections of turians, salarians, and even the odd krogan. She substantially dumbed-down the enemy subroutines so she wouldn't have to worry about tactics; she could point and shoot.

_"Commander, great news, the Admiral did it!"_

She'd left her helmet radio off and her com-link in the equipment room. She didn't want to be disturbed while she was blasting things. Ricketts' blaring announcement over the com-sim's PA was not only annoying, but it threw off her perfect headshot on a turian at a hundred meters. Cara cursed.

"Cut it!" she ordered the base's integrated VI system, shutting down the simulation. "You know, Ricketts," she shouted up at the speakers, "I left my radio off for a reason."

_"Sorry, Commander."_ He sounded apologetic, but Cara suspected he was too ecstatic to really be bothered about having bothered her._ "Just thought you deserved to hear the good news; the Admiral convinced the brass to send us some reinforcements. _SSV Somme, Hamburg, _and _Ukraine_ are gonna be joining up with us real soon!"_

"Yes, wonderful." Cara exited the simulator and set down her rifle on the racks. She found Ricketts in the control room, he was with Garces, as usual. Also with him were Alvin Hyatt, Richard Johnson, and Mahmoud Hamad; three Marines from three different units who had never worked well together. They were all grinning. Cara smelled alcohol.

She looked at the five of them. "Let me guess, the Admiral's authorized a little celebration?"

Hyatt nodded enthusiastically. "Within reason, of course. But I have to say, he knows his liquor."

Cara smiled. Stockholm did know his liquor. "Am I invited to join the festivities?"

"Bloody heck, ma'am," Garces drawled, "we wouldn't have it without you. You made it all happen."

"Her and the Admiral," Johnson corrected the corporal. Garces laughed and leaned on Ricketts. She'd obviously had too much to drink already. Cara made a mental note: Franca Garces, lightweight.

"Corporal!" Garces immediately straightened and saluted. "Ma'am!"

"Sure." Cara shrugged. "I'll join your little booze-fest. I've got a bone to pick with the Admiral anyway. Just let me get out of this armor. Which way to the rec room?"

Positioned adjacent to the mess hall, the rec room contained the few amenities such a remote outpost was able to get its hands on, including a hundred and fifty year-old CRT video game console, a ping-pong table, a small wet bar—and a massive eight-sided steel MMA cage, courtesy of one of Stockholm's more generous private backers.

The rec room was separated from the mess hall by nothing but air, and when she got there, Cara discovered that the Marines had arranged all the tables into one big row, then stacked beers down its whole length, along with a number of specialty provisions from Stockholm's own stash. It was hardly a low-key affair.

The men and women of the Frontier Security Task Force filled the open space, Marine intermingling with their counterparts from the Navy who crewed the _Ardenne_, telling jokes, sharing stories, and laughing raucously in the time-honored tradition of barmates.

Cara had changed into her casual fatigues, and wore her hair in a ponytail. She sensed some intentional shoulder-rubbing as she moved through the crowd, giving out curt nods to the people she recognized, people she had hand-picked.

She found the Admiral over by the ring, leaning up against the apron with his arm draped over the shoulders of Monica Pierce, a data analysis officer from the _Ardenne_ bridge crew. She was smiling and laughing while Stockholm told a story to Sparrow, _Ardenne_'s veteran pilot.

Cara announced her presence with an expectant "Ahem!" and flashed Ms. Pierce an icy smile.

"Uh, Admiral, will you excuse me for just a second?" Monica stammered under Cara's intense scrutiny.

Stockholm, noticing Cara, immediately withdrew his arm from the foreign shoulders and offered Cara a glass of amber brandy. "Shepard, glad you made it! I was worried you'd stand me up for a date with the base VI."

Sparrow laughed. Cara scowled as she took the glass of booze from the Admiral and took a generous gulp, violating her promise to the doctor not to take anything with her meds. The liquor burned all the way down her throat. It was a good feeling, one she missed.

She swayed on her feet a tiny bit as the last of it cleared her throat and the aftertaste kicked in. "I see you got the good stuff."

"Nothing but the best," replied the Admiral. He produced another glass and raised it high in the air, instantly summoning near-complete silence. "I propose a toast," he said to the congregated mass of humanity. "A toast, to the prosperity and betterment of Humankind."

"Aye!" came the chorus of replies from cheap beer bottle-bearing Marines and Naval personnel. The mass clinking of glass on glass was like a gentle explosion. Cara disobeyed Dr. MacKay one more time and drained her brandy.

She fixed Admiral Stockholm with a wolfish glower. "So about Ms. Pierce, Admiral..."

"I promise you, purely professional," he assured her, taking another sip of his own brandy. Cara mischievously reached over and tipped the contents of the glass into the Admiral's face so that it poured down the front of his shirt.

Men hooted and hollered.

Admiral Stockholm calmly wiped his face and gave her a strange look. "Shepard, do you know what you just did?"

Cara flicked back a wisp of hair from her face. "I just embarrassed you, Admiral. Care for a chance to get even?"

He grinned eagerly. "Oh, I think we're going inside the steel to settle this one."

They locked foreheads. "You're on, Admiral. Think you can take me?"

The gathered crowd crushed in around them, all highly in support of this new development between the Commander and the Admiral. They began chanting "Cage! Cage! Cage!"

Stockholm must have thought ahead, because he ripped off his shirt to display a spandex tank and muscular arms atypical for a man over seventy. Cara backed away and pulled off her own shirt, stripping down to an athletic top and wrestling tights. The crowd roared their approval. Someone opened the chain link door to the cage and the two of them stepped inside.

Hyatt jumped in after them to play the part of ring announcer and referee. He spoke into a handheld radio linked in with the base intercom system, blasting his words through the entire rec room.

"This is a mixed-martial arts bout set for one-fall. Introducing first, from Scandinavia, weighing in at one hundred twelve kilograms: Lucian Stockholm!"

The Marines pressed up close to the steel link walls of the cage and sent up a cheer for the well-liked Admiral, who gave a brief wave as he limbered up for the match. Cara clapped sarcastically.

Hyatt continued. "And his opponent, from the Chicago Industrial Zone, weighing in at sixty-eight kilograms: Carolina Shepard!" Again, the crowd cheered, more enthusiastically than they had for Stockholm, which--in addition to being announced as "Carolina"--was a genuine surprise. Cara had never thought this team was particularly fond of her, even if they thought she was hot. Maybe it was just the booze.

Someone, probably Bellamy, rang the bell.

Cara and Stockholm immediately started circling one another, strategizing, each daring the other. Cara had the height, just barely, but Stockholm clearly had the strength and weight advantage. And she knew him; he liked to play to his strengths. He also liked to make the first move, which he did, lunging forward to lock up with her and play his power game. But Cara dodged, ducking under his grasp and immediately cinching in an armbar, twisting and stretching the tendons and muscles in his left arm. For good measure, she drove a few knees into his stomach, much to the delight of the crowd.

Chafing under the attack to his arm, Stockholm dropped to a knee, trying to get pressure off his critical joints. Cara she wasn't close to having him under control. The Admiral was crafty and devious--she learned that the day she met him. Hyatt hovered about, asking the pointless question of whether or not Stockholm wanted to give it up. He might as well have saved his breath, because Stockholm didn't quit something. Ever.

Suddenly, after executing a neat roll on the mat which relieved the torque Cara was applying to his arm, Stockholm scooped her up and hefted her onto his shoulders. Before she could do anything to counter what he was doing, the Admiral hurled her bodily into the chain link cage wall.

Her body ricocheted off unforgiving steel. The crowd roared. Clutching her in a bearhug, Stockholm smashed her shoulders into the cage a second time, then dropped her to go for a cover, pinning her shoulders to the mat as Hyatt counted.

Cara kicked her shoulder off the mat at a two-count, forcing Stockholm to break and release. Her body was on fire, but the pain was her drug, it energized her.

She scrambled to her feet and swung a full-armed chop as he came at her, catching him squarely across the chest. She heard the air leave his lungs in a whoosh, and quickly followed up with another chop. At ringside, Garces, Ricketts, and Haytham shouted encouragements to her, and Cara went for a third chop, but this time Stockholm countered, seizing her arm and flinging her across the ring. With a counter of her own, Cara bounced her body off the ropes and hurled toward him, aiming her shoulder straight for his gut.

But Stockholm countered her again. Instead of cutting him down, Cara flew past him and barely avoided colliding with the steel cage walls yet again. As she recovered, Stockholm wasted no time and hit her with a quick vertical suplex, lifting her straight over his shoulders and slamming her back-first into the middle of the ring. Before she could recover from that, he cinched in a rear headlock, utilizing all his leverage to keep the pressure on, trying to choke her out.

Cara saw purple spots in her vision, and remembered with sudden clarity Dr. MacKay's warning about the side-effects of her medication with other drugs in her system. She shook away the thought. One drink wasn't going to put her under. The problem was the mundane matter of oxygen deprivation. Stockholm had her good, his suplex having stunned her long enough for him to assert near total control, and Cara didn't like it.

Referee Hyatt buzzed about, asking if she wanted to quit. She shook her head venomously and renewed her efforts to get free. But with Stockholm's massive biceps wrapped around her neck, he wasn't going to give her an easy time of it. She would have to work for it, and that Cara didn't mind so much.

Trying to counteract his leverage by pushing off with her legs, Cara managed to squirm herself into a more advantageous position, relieving some of the pressure on her neck and allowing her to quickly gulp some much-needed air before Stockholm could compensate. She used her burst of energy to slam her elbow into the side of his head behind her, staggering his grip and allowing her to break free.

Immediately, she leaped on top of him and twisted his arm behind his back, using her elbow to batter at his shoulder in an effort to neutralize his power game. Despite the punishment, Stockholm got back to his feet and swung a roundhouse at her, which she dodged, using his forward momentum to bounce him off the ropes and right into her two-footed dropkick.

All one hundred twelve kilos of him crashed to the mat, and Cara instantly went for the cover. Hyatt counted, but Stockholm rolled his shoulder up at two.

Cara backed up into one of the corners as she waited for him to regain his vertical base, then charged. Stockholm dodged. He ducked out of the way and sent her crashing into the steel cage wall. The crowd oohed as her head cracked against the chain link, tearing a laceration above her right eyebrow that leaked blood into her eye.

Momentarily dizzied, she clutched at the chain link for support as she tried to get her wits about her, but Stockholm was already moving. In her dazed state, he easily scooped her onto his shoulders, slamming her forcefully down onto the mat.

Cara's whole head was ringing, she was seeing double, and rather than slowing, time seemed to speed up. Stockholm planted her shoulders on the mat and Hyatt counted three before she was really even aware of it.

The crowd cheered a match well-played and Hyatt raised Stockholm's hand in victory. Cara rolled to the side and tried to maintain control of her stomach contents, feeling the drugs in her system, both the meds and the ill-advised alcohol. After a minute, Stockholm helped her to her feet and she started to regain her composure, slowly shaking off the attack of spontaneous molecular degeneration.

"You let me win," Stockholm whispered into her ear.

"Of course I did," she replied nastily. "Rematch, then?"

He chuckled. "Later, I promise."

* * *

Cara didn't stay for the whole shindig. Something having to do with the sweat soaking her skin and hair, plus the fact that she got bored with parties period. After sticking around for a little bit, during which most of the Marines got themselves royally wasted, she headed off to the showers.

They were empty, not a soul in sight, so Cara just peeled out of her spandex wrestling tights and turned on one of two shower heads partitioned from one another by a sheet of opaque plastic that rose only to about mid-chest height. She hesitated just a moment, and then pulled the thin gold chain with its tiny crucifix from her neck and set it carefully on a clean white towel before stepping under the cold stream of water.

She barely flinched when it hit her skin. Her body was still mostly acclimated to bathing in frigid water, as Penal Colony PN27 wasn't exactly interested in inmates' comfort. The showers there were ice cold, and she'd lived with them for six and a half years. Old habits die hard, harder in her case.

After letting the water cool her down, Cara dialed it up a few degrees, not too warm, but warmer than icy. The simple pleasure of warm water was something she wasn't fully accustomed to yet, but she was getting there. Inevitably, she always turned the water back to its coldest setting, but just having the choice was enjoyable enough.

Having soaked for a few minutes—a pleasure in and of itself, showers were still regulated, but they were more accommodating than the five-minute scrub she was used to—Cara cast about for a bar of soap, only to find the shower stall destitute of that one necessity.

Any other time she would have been annoyed, but between the fighting, Lucian, and the shower her mood had improved considerably. In fact, she was downright cheerful. Instead of her normal M.O. which would have had her mumbling curse words in a salarian dialect she'd learned from a queer cellmate, she made a mental list of hair care products she would have died to have on the base.

Without turning the water off, Cara walked—dripping wet—back to the racks with the towels and found one solitary bar of soap, grabbed it, and returned to her date with the running water.

She scrubbed herself vigorously, more thoroughly than she usually did, and not because of the sweat. For the first time in a long time, she was starting to feel good about herself, and as a result, felt like she wanted to feel cleaner than usual, maybe as a way to say to herself that she'd left Fugitive Four and those six and a half years of misery behind, maybe just to be a little extra special for Lucian. Either one suited her.

Cara was washing her thick blonde mane when she heard someone enter the shower room, drop a few clothes on the nearby shelves, and turn on the shower next to hers. She turned to look.

It was Admiral Stockholm.

"Thought I'd wash up," he said randomly, as if he thought he needed to justify his presence. With her hands fulls of soapy hair, Cara gave him a lopsided grin and then pretended to ignore him.

As she was rinsing out her hair, she couldn't help noticing his feet on the floor next to her. The partition didn't go all the way down either, so she could see his feet and some of his calf muscles. Soapy bubbles poured from her hair, ran down the length of her body, and disappeared down the drain. Cara deliberately moved her foot closer to his.

"Cara, can I borrow your soap?" he asked. "Cara?"

By the time Cara realized she was staring at him, she didn't care. There he was, standing not eighteen inches from her, soaking wet and muscles still fired up like hers from the intense wrestling. The water might have washed away most of the sweat, but Cara was sure she could still taste it. Not hers, his.

He had promised her a rematch.

"Don't you mean 'Carolina', Lucian?" she breathed huskily. Her hand dropped the bar of soap.

Reaching over, she snagged him by the neck and pulled him close. His hands buried themselves in her wet hair as their lips met, tongues intermingled, and their bodies pressed against each other. Kissing passionately, both had entirely forgotten about the water running in the background.

"That was some wrestling, hmm, Carolina?" Lucian murmured, his hands caressing her neck.

Cara gave him a wet kiss on her lower lip before leaning in for another round. "Carolina, my ass."

She held his face tight with both hands, letting herself go with reckless abandon. The feel of his body close to hers made her dizzy with longing, the taste of his lips seemed to close off everything else, making the world a distant, faraway thing, muddled and gray before the all-encompassing sensation of touch and passion.

It was sheer bliss.

Only then did she realize something was wrong. Her heart pounded, her limbs weakening. Her dizzied head spun crazily, but it wasn't from ecstasy. She'd been drugged. It had happened to her enough times for her to recognize the signs.

Panic hit her when she realized it had to have been something in the soap, most likely a tranquilizer.

Frantic, she tried to pull away from Stockholm, but to her horror his fingers only tightened into a vise-like grip on her shoulders. Over the span of mere seconds he'd gone intimate lover to cold, remorseless rock.

"Don't try it, Cara," he whispered into her ear.

Belatedly, Cara's instincts tried to kick her into high gear, but the more she struggled, the weaker and more powerless she became, while Stockholm's iron grip only got stronger. She was now so dizzy she could barely tell up from down.

Her consciousness ebbed at an alarming rate. "Why?" she panted.

Stockholm's face was now something distant and blurry, too indistinct for her to make out his expression. "I gave you a choice, Shepard. I guess I knew you'd choose the hard way."

"You—son of—a..."

Just before she blacked out, the last thing she heard was the sound of water still streaming from the shower head. And then nothing.


	8. Chapter 8

The Cage

"Aria's expecting me!"

The indignant, albeit impotent, protest fell upon deaf ears—or elcor ears, which were practically the same thing. Ninety-nine percent of the ever-present rabble perpetually crowding the entrance to the famed Afterlife Club-the nerve center of Omega Station-would never be admitted, and they all knew it. Maya had watched the exact same scene played out at the front door so many times it wasn't even amusing anymore; some weakling human or other street trash with the same bland excuses trying to trick, bribe, or otherwise deceive the massive bouncer into letting him/her inside.

Lowlifes never seemed to get that they weren't wanted, because they always came back with fresh spins on the same tired fantasies, the bouncers never fell for a one of them. Fortunately, Maya was privileged by birth, and was waved through the line with hardly a second's delay.

Inside, the massive club's dark and hostile environment was just as she remembered, loud music blasting through every corner, static motion flames on the walls making it only too clear which afterlife was the club's namesake, a parallel that made Maya smile. The notion of a bipolar after-world was the only good thing to come out of the discovery of mankind, apart from their delicious boys.

She was dressed appropriately, in a slinky, leggy dress that clung to what skin it covered and left an enticing amount exposed, displaying her genetically ideal asari proportions to a degree that was sure to draw glances, even in a place like Afterlife. Orange and yellow gemstone ornaments hung from piercings on the tips of her crest; nothing formal, just flashy. Maya did love to steal a show, and her club girl persona served her particularly well when trying to disguise her commando training. A pair of luscious indigo legs, a well-endowed bosom, and seductively-swaying hips were often enough to distract an observer from making more delicate and precise analyses.

Not that she expected to fool Aria T'Loak, though. Maya was savvy, but not arrogant enough to think she would slip under Aria's radar. T'Loak was a shrewd woman, a ruthless and deadly adversary to anyone who made the mistake of crossing her. She and Haliat were rumored to have once been lovers, which put an ironic spin on Omega's cardinal rule. He was supposedly the only one to ever break that rule and escape with his life.

Aria likely knew just about everything there was to know about Haliat. She'd certainly know Maya was associated with him. But Maya was more or less an independent contractor, part of her own little cell and of relatively little importance to Haliat's main ventures. If her mere presence in the lion's den didn't pique T'Loak's interest, Maya was counting on the possibility of her free-agency to entice her. She wasn't on Aria's immediate hit list—she had, after all, walked in the front door—so there was a chance the Omega boss might be convinced to impart some of her near-limitless information.

Passing reveling partiers on the dance floor as she dodged glowing orange trays carried about by semi-nude cocktail waitresses, Maya pushed her way past badly-drunken turian and batarian thugs on her way to the center of the club, where the enormous circular stage overlooked all. She sidled up to one of the bars, approaching an enraptured turian on his sixth or seventh drink, drooling onto the bar as he watched the writhing forms above.

Maya put a glowing hand to the turian's neck. A slight biotic pulse was all it took to shut down his chemically-influenced brain altogether. She coolly slid the body to the floor and took his place at the bar, the batarian bartender hardly giving the dead turian a second glance as he wiped the spit from the counter. After she'd forked over some credits, the bartender poured Maya four shots of distilled krogan spirits, deliberately ogling her ample bustline as she quickly downed all four. Maya gave him a flirty glance.

She was in no hurry, content to wait until Aria decided it was time for a chat with the friendly neighborhood agent of a rival gang. Comfortable in her blanket of deceptive sensuality, Maya let herself be entranced by the gyrating movements of the dancers on stage, their bodies slick with perspiration and iridescent oils, the enormous cylindrical screen complementing everything with its garish images of sex and violence.

Even if she found racial incest boring—the prospect of having sexual relations with another asari was repugnant—she still held a certain appreciation for watching an asari use her assets to such striking effect. While she sipped, Maya fantasized, in her mind's eye interposing various people in the dancers' places. She smiled to herself. This was a good day's work.

Eventually, a suave turian slid up beside her. He was much more collected than the poor fool lying dead behind her, a seasoned club-goer by the looks of him.

"Quite something, aren't they?" he remarked, obviously speaking of the buffet of voluptuous women on the stage. "Even if you aren't into that sort of thing, you have to admit there's just something about watching an asari dancer strut her stuff. Omega attracts the best dancers in Terminus, and Afterlife hires only the best of Omega. Aria signs all the contracts herself, you know. She takes a rather... well, let's say personal interest in the people she hires." He nonchalantly drained a long shot of liquor.

_You've got the boss's attention_, was what he was saying. It wasn't hard to read between the lines, but Maya decided to play it out for a bit longer, just to see what he'd do.

The turian leaned closer to her, Maya smelled red sand. "Rumor has it she doesn't fire anyone here, and she doesn't turn down job applications either."

Maya turned innocently to him. "Oh? What happens to people she doesn't want working here, then?"

The turian gave a sly grin and indicated the empty shot glasses in front of her. "What is it you think you're drinking?" _Time to see the boss, smartass._

Maya affected an amused giggle and hopped off her stool. "I'm so sorry, can you help me find the girls' room? I think maybe I've had a little too much to drink."

The turian smirked. "Sure, let me just give you a hand." He gripped her by the forearm and pretended to gently lead her through the crowd. Maya suspected he had a syringe ready, just out of sight, in case she needed to die quickly and silently. Aria was always prepared.

Once out of the crowd, he pulled her up a short set of stairs to the executive suite in the back of the club, to the dark and empty anteroom where he pushed her against the wall and began to suddenly grope her.

"Sorry for the inconvenience, ma'am," he quipped out of the side of a nasty grin as he deliberately pinched her left nipple. "Men in my line of work can't be too careful." Satisfied, he stepped away from her and indicated the inner door. Maya glared.

The Omega queen's suite overlooked the main floor of the boisterous Afterlife. Aria T'Loak herself was seated on a posh leather divan flanked on either side by oil-slick asari strippers gyrating on poles. She watched Maya approach with the same bored scorn as she was used to getting from Haliat. It was more bearable from T'Loak, though; she was a fellow asari. But Maya harbored no illusions that such thin kinship entitled her to any favor from Aria. This was one dangerous woman.

"So," said the Omega boss nonchalantly, "I see Haliat sent one of his toys to pester me."

Maya stuck her chin out. "I came on my own, actually."

"Really? Let's talk."

Maya raised her brow. "You aren't worried I'm an assassin?"

Aria gave an uninterested shake of her head. "We did full-body scans while Grizz was... sizing you up. There is absolutely nothing threatening about you, Maya Ibsehn." She smirked a little. "Someone who missed the cut to make commando is no danger to me in any case."

That remark stung, but Maya covered it with a shrug as she sat down opposite Afterlife's infamous owner. "So you know about that."

"I know everything I need to, especially about my enemies." Aria gave her a look. "I trust you're already aware that you're an enemy of mine, I won't have to spell that out for you? No? Good."

"So, you aren't concerned I'm here to gather intelligence for Haliat?" Maya asked.

"Concerned? No," Aria responded in turn. "Concern is for paranoid, delusional fanatics, and I'm a businesswoman. I always know exactly who I'm doing business with. Espionage isn't in your play-book, and it never was."

Maya leaned forward, resting her chin on her palm. "What is in my play-book, then?"

"You really do enjoy hearing about yourself," the Omega boss chuckled in an entirely non-humorous way. "Illegal xenophilia, murder for hire, corporate corruption, and most recently, piracy." She clucked her tongue. "I can see why Matriarch Otissa wants to forget she ever embraced that sorry batarian prostitute."

Maya had to fight to keep her jaw from dropping. The one secret she'd assumed inviolable even to Aria T'Loak was now out in the open; Maya's connection to the controversial Otissa. Highly influential in Thessian politics, the Matriarch had expended a considerable amount of resources to ensure that she could never be traced to Maya Ibsehn the drop-out, Maya Ibsehn the failure; her own daughter. Self-righteous skank.

Aria was good. Perhaps better than even Maya had credited her.

She smirked. Suddenly, Maya realized Aria was firmly in control of the conversation. "Grizz, I think our guest here needs a drink. She looks rather dry at the moment."

The turian handed Maya a flask and she took a nervous gulp. This was not at all going as she had planned. But then, it was Aria, what had she expected? She was having trouble keeping her purpose straight, becoming more concerned with her immediate safety more than getting the information she needed. Despite the boss's attitude of indifference, Maya harbored no illusions that she was free to leave at any time. And staying was dangerous.

"What's this foolish errand of yours, then?" Aria asked suddenly, not allowing Maya to take the lead. The Omega queen asserting her control. She was scary good. Maya wondered how many guards she could take out with her biotics before Aria crushed her skull in.

"I need some information."

Aria smirked knowingly. Her response was pointedly uninterested. "I don't make a habit of supporting factions with agendas counter-productive to my interests."

"This isn't part of my work for Haliat." That was true, partially. Haliat had given her an ultimatum, and this was part of it. This was self-preservation. "He and I are at something of an impasse with regard to my contractual obligations. I'm currently pursuing my own interests." Again, true, if only just. Revenge was her own interest, that it would put her in better standing with Haliat was secondary, now.

She was putting everything out to sell, but Aria wasn't buying.

"You're an asset of his, a resource, and Haliat doesn't waste resources," Aria rejoined, her tone cold as ever. "I know how he works. Even your silly little pirate group Snakehead have some usefulness, however limited. So he'll make you rich while he treats you like trash, and there's nothing you and your kind can do about it as long as he's the one lining your pockets."

"He's planning a coup in Terminus," Maya suddenly blurted.

Aria laughed. "You think this is news to me? Haliat is planning a coup, really? Half of Terminus knows, and the other half is cheering him on."

"It's not like you're thinking," Maya clarified. "He knows he can't prevail in a straight-up war with the opposing factions, that would be bad for business for everyone. He's going to lure the more powerful clans to his side without having to fight. Barbarossa; it's his master plan to broker alliances with his primary opposition."

"Hearsay, gossip, you could have picked that up on any street-corner." Aria piffled. "Pardon me if I'm not taken in by your fantasies."

Maya hesitated, then took the plunge. "Is it fantasy that he got the name Barbarossa from you, something having to do with obscure human history that appealed to him?"

A dark look came over Aria's face. Suddenly she stood and gave the two strippers hard glares. They immediately hopped off their poles and left. Turning back to look at Maya, her face was the picture of intimidation. "Haliat's former connection to me is a popular urban myth, but the truth behind that myth is something very few people are aware of. What does a human-humping nonentity like you know about this alleged operation 'Barbarossa'?"

Inwardly, Maya smiled at last. She'd played her strongest card, and won, at least for now. She had one crucial opening.

"It's the most ingenious strategy—military, political, or economical—for a takeover of this or any other social system. He certainly borrowed certain elements from your own storied rise to power, but far the greater portion of it is his unique brilliance. You see, I'm very perceptive when it comes to my work. For the better part of six years he's had me laying the groundwork for his master plan, and I've been able to deduce quite a lot in that time."

Haliat's befuddling orders of recent weeks were but symptomatic of his larger purpose, and part of a pattern Maya had learned to recognize. She didn't yet know what such useless cargo as she'd been seizing had to do with his plan, but she had little doubt that it was connected in some way. "I'm part of his organization. In addition to what I've put together from my own sources, I'm in possession of privileged information."

Maya had a feeling that Aria knew less about Barbarossa than she was comfortable with. Even what Maya knew was mostly guesswork, aside from the few concrete things she did know. She had enough to get a general picture of what he had planned, but he was less than forthcoming about specifics, making guesses more sketchy.

"I see," Aria responded. Did Maya detect the slightest hint of interest in her voice? "What is it you want, Ibsehn?"

Finally, she was to the root of the problem, and it was down to business now. "I need to find an Alliance ship. She's called the _Ardenne_..."

* * *

It was white when she woke up. The lights shining in her eyes, the papery gown draped over her body, the thin wires leading from a nest of electrodes covering her forehead; everything was white. IV drips clung to her arms like parasites, force-feeding her some cocktail of drugs from translucent medical bags suspended from racks containing banks of various instruments.

Her eyes roamed the tiny white room while her head was strapped down to the gurney, as were her arms and legs. Familiar restraints. Underneath a cool swath of bandages wrapped around the base of her skull, Cara could feel the points of incision knitted together with medigel still weeping blood into the soft cotton.

Cara's waking mind added the stimuli fast. She knew exactly what had been done to her.

Arching her back violently, Cara bucked against the restraints. The gurney jerked about on its wheels as she thrashed her body wildly, snapping off delicate electrodes and upsetting the beeping monitors.

Above her frenzied growls of rage, Cara heard a plaintive voice objecting, attempting to pacify. "Commander Shepard, please, it's alright!"

Calming herself, Cara focused on the source of the querulous voice. A bespectacled, lab coat-wearing doctor with a distressed expression on his face appeared above her. "I'm a medical doctor with the Systems Alliance, ma'am," he said as if to reassure her. She was not reassured. "You're in friendly hands, I promise."

She glared with all the authority of a five-star admiral. "Take. These. Fracking. Wires. Off me!"

"Aye aye, ma'am!" he stammered, and quickly shut off the protesting machines and disconnected wires, finally peeling the rest of the electrodes from her forehead. He gestured. "You see? I mean you no harm."

Cara watched him intently. "Why the restraints?" she asked.

The doctor was sweating profusely. "They were for your own protection. Now that I see you're awake I—I'll remove them," he stammered.

She waited patiently while he undid the steel-reinforced fiber straps around her head, wrists, and ankles. Immediately upon her arms being freed Cara ripped out the IV needles, flexed her hands, and put her feet to the floor. Without warning and with vicious intent, she lunged at the Alliance doctor, grabbing two fistfuls of his lab coat and shoving against the nearest wall.

"Who in the bleeding heck do you think you are?" she snarled.

"I'm just a scientist, please!"

Inundated by fury, Cara rattled him hard enough to make his head crack against the hard white surface. "You put a chip in me, now you're going to take it out," she ordered.

His eyes shifted, as if seeking some escape or protection from her livid rage. "But-"

"I don't care! Take it out, now!"

"I can't," he whined.

Cara stabbed her middle and index fingers into the doctor's nostrils and twisted the rubbery cartilage with violent force. The man screamed in pain.

This was nothing. This was a friendly greeting compared to some of the other things she knew how to do to people. Cara wasn't even started. "I said take it out!"

"That will be enough, Commander!" Cara's head swiveled at the sound of the authoritative voice. An asari jaunted into the room, swathed from neck to toe in the dark, flexible hardsuit of an asari commando.

Cara let go of the hyperventilating Alliance doctor and stepped back, eying the new arrival warily. "So who the frack are you?"

The asari gave her a dangerous look. "You don't ask questions. Information is a luxury you'll have to live without. You're expected to think on your toes. Suffice it to say that I work for Isis. She's in charge here and she will answer your questions when and if she deems it important enough."

"You'd better do as she says, Commander," said the shaken doctor, still comforting his wounded nose. "They don't need us. The Admiral made them compromise by agreeing to let me oversee the operation."

Cara frowned at him, hearing but not comprehending.

"We're not on an Alliance base, Commander," he admitted. "This is a private facility, run by an asari called Isis. That's all I can tell you, because that's honestly all I know."

The imposing asari crossed her arms. "Yes, you can leave now, doctor. Your shuttle is waiting."

The doctor rushed out like he had been released from prison, leaving Cara alone with the asari.

She took a better look at the tall blue humanoid, and noticed that she lacked the facial markings so common among the asari species. She had a strong, angular face that lacked any spare softness, skin drawn so tight against the facial muscles that she almost seemed manufactured. This lent Cara the sense that, as in-charge as she seemed, this woman was preprogrammed.

"What are you then?" Cara asked warily. "Some kind of warden?"

The asari was impassive. She tossed Cara a set of clothes without answering her question. "Put these on, you're coming with me."

Cara threw them to the floor, having no patience for the asari's imperiousness. "I'm not going anywhere until you fracking tell me-"

She was only halfway into an angry tirade when a mass of biotic energy slammed into her chest. Her body careened backward into a stack of equipment, knocking over the IV drips, snapping more delicate wires connecting to dozens of machines. Before she'd even settled, Cara felt herself lifting into the air. Her bowels shifted. Cara resisted the strong impulse to flail her limbs, refusing to give her attacker the satisfaction of seeing her so helpless.

When the floor rushed back up to claim her, she hit with surprising force, as if her body had forgotten how heavy it was. Cara's body ached.

"Start changing," the asari ordered in an even tone that belied no irritation or annoyance. "Or come naked if you want. I don't really care, either way you're following." She leaned casually by the door, arms crossed, and watched Cara intently.

Cara ripped off the white gown and stood naked and defiant, enjoying a moment of pristine anger before she forced reason on herself. She would need that anger again soon, but for now she needed to play things smart.

Coolly and calmly, she began to dress, pulling on dull gray slacks and a black shirt that was a little too tight. Her thoughts were nothing more than cold intellectual assessments.

She briefly contemplated ripping open the scars on her neck and tearing out the biotic implant herself, but even she knew that was nothing but an invitation to self-lobotomy. The operation was a delicate brain surgery, and one of those things that couldn't be undone by brute force. She would have to find a doctor to do it for her, and at the moment, that was out of her reach.

As she laced a pair of light-wear boots, she glanced over at the asari, who had maintained professional detachment the entire time. Cara doubted she had any other setting. "So what do I call you, then?"

A hint of an amused smile—of a personality—tugged at the corners of her mouth. "I'm your warden," she answered.

"Frack." It was Wake all over again. Soldiers die needlessly on an op, kill the asari slut responsible, get sold out by your commander. Rot for six years.

She was going to have to cut her hair short—long hair made it easier to be restrained while you were being raped.

"If you're ready, we're going now."

As she started to follow her jailkeeper from this relative sanctum into her undefined prison, she noticed a tiny glint of something lying on a forgotten tray next to her gurney where she'd left the remnants of her white gown.

It was a silver cross on a thin gold chain.

Cara stared dumbfounded for a moment, then quickly scooped up the precious talisman and hurried after the asari jailer.

Teeth of Vengeance.

* * *

_45:37... 45:32... 45:25..._

The mission clock ticked down impossibly slow. Ariadne had to force herself to stop anxiously checking her chronometer with every few passing seconds and focus on controlling her breathing so she wouldn't give herself away with careless noise. Her opponents were neither stupid nor complacent, and they were dead-set on finding her. No one had made it this far into a bandit scenario before, Ariadne was breaking new ground, and that meant the pressure was on doubly so for both her and her adversaries. She was bound and determined to make the new record, and they were desperate not to be her stepping stone.

The scenario was a deceptively simple one: A team of four recruits was given a flag point to defend from one or more "bandits", a lone trainee usually from high on the table. The flag point would change positions intermittently, at irregular intervals, giving the bandit opportunities to steal the "flag"-actually a cylindrical core carrying recording instruments—and keep it from the defending team until the mission clock ran down to zero. 200 minutes were put on the clock for each round, and for as long as the clock was ticking nearly every trick and maneuver they knew was legal.

The old record was two rounds in a row, but Ariadne was going for three. 600 minutes of cat and mouse with angry biotics.

As she crouched, the heavy flag dug into her back painfully, but she couldn't move into a more comfortable position without making unwanted noise. Her dull gray and black trainee uniform was hopelessly soiled by dirt, sand, and loam from the environment, and a slimy layer of mud was caked over her face and scalp to mask the bright, pale blue of her skin. It was a trick she'd first learned from watching her dad's ancient 2D holovids back home.

_32:59... 32:47... 32:44..._

Endurance was key. According to the rules, she could wait for almost the whole round, 180 minutes in fact, before first snatching the flag. But the longer she held onto it, the higher the end score she would receive for the scenario, and she wanted this victory as legitimate and complete as possible. Almost everyone on the Cage already hated her, and she didn't expect to make any new friends by beating the old record, but she had to do it.

Ariadne needed to convince herself that she could do anything.

_29:35... 29:28..._

They were creeping into her view now. One asari, two turians, and a batarian; all were angry, hot-tempered, and each was extremely dangerous. They were fatigued, but not nearly as fatigued as Ariadne. If she had to take them all on with her biotics, she'd most definitely lose. She was competent but no prodigy.

"That stupid little bitch!" one of the turians swore as he pulverized a dead bush with a crush field in frustration.

"Settle down, Vernus!" the batarian growled. "She's getting to you, that's what she wants. It's just one little asari; a kid, basically."

"That's the entire fracking point, Dennick!" Vernus fired back. "We're getting beat by a kid, and I'm not putting her inferior ass further up in the tables by losing!"

"Shut your holes, will you?" the other turian, a thug named Patrus, grumbled.

Ariadne watched them bicker and argue from an overgrown crag of rock, sandwiched between slippery trailers of damp vines and the hard lichen-encrusted precipice. If she just continued to keep her cool, they would probably walk right under her and never notice she was there. Her dad had taught her how to hide in just about any place she could imagine, but she was best at it in the jungle, which was where her third round had so providentially been assigned to take place. The volcanic zone would have been quite different, and much more challenging with how tired she was. The skills she'd once used to avoid her chores were now keeping her camouflaged almost beyond all reason.

"Stop giving our position away, you're just helping her. Her luck is going to run out eventually; she's got disadvantaged genes." The one person Ariadne was worried about was the asari on the opposing team, Riell T'Vornak. Ariadne recognized her voice instantly.

Riell had one of the meanest dispositions she'd ever seen, and she despised humans which applied by extension to Ariadne because of who her father was. Riell had been shooting to break the record on the bandit scenario, but Ariadne was beating her to it, and that made her hate Ariadne all the more. Riell was the one with the most to lose from Ariadne's success, and when things didn't go her way, she was known to get murderous.

So Ariadne now had a priority: take out T'Vornak.

Ariadne wondered what she had left to muster. After nine and a half hours of constant skirmish/evasion scenarios she was not only physically exhausted, but her neurological functioning was sluggish. An otherwise simple biotic lift was more challenging to execute using only the fatigue-ravaged bones of stamina.

There was one option, but Ariadne was unsure if she dare try it. She had some ability and skill—her mother had seen to that—but she was no biotic adept, and what she was considering was dangerous for a novice like her to attempt. Even if it worked, the four on the other team would recover before she could inflict enough damage, and she'd end up having to be patched together in the science lab when they ripped her apart.

Ariadne's heart began pounding afresh, her adrenaline glands kicking into high gear and turning her concealing crouch into a torturous cramping agony as her body begging to be let free. But she couldn't move yet, she needed to somehow draw their attention away, get them distracted by something else so she would have even a chance of success.

_25:19... 25:11... 25:03..._

Riell suddenly straightened. "Hold up," she said. Her batarian and turian companions stopped their prowling and stood stock still.

Ariadne held her breath tight in her chest, terrified they'd seen her too soon.

"Did you hear that?" Patrus asked. Ariadne had to fight to keep from reflexively igniting a defensive biotic barrier around herself. If she did, the telltale blue glow would give her away for certainty.

Dennick, the batarian, snickered. "I hope her little ass is ready-"

Cutting him off mid-sentence, Dennick suddenly sprawled on the ground and was quickly dragged into a tangle of brush. There was wild thrashing, muffled cursing, and the sickening sound of heavy blows being exchanged as he and his attacker grappled out of her sight.

Riell and the two turians sent biotic warp fields blindly into the trees, heedless of hitting their teammate.

Ariadne seized the opportunity, while T'Vornak was preoccupied, to make her move. Committing to the act, she gave in to her body's insistent urges and allowed the protective barrier to snap in place over her body, limning it with refractive blue energy.

She'd never attempted this before, and from what she'd been told, short of a singularity this was the most hazardous thing for a fledgling biotic to try. Her body was gathering energy, coiling itself like a spring waiting to be released. Her perception of time slowed and paradoxically increased, making her hyperalert and aware of the smallest things.

She waited what seemed like hours, but it was only a half-second until she had attained enough stored momentum to smash through a speeding podcar.

Ariadne charged. It didn't happen at all the way she expected.

There was no sensation of acceleration, deceleration, or even velocity. It was more like space bending forward for a brief instant to deposit her on the far side of the fold before it snapped back into place. There was no perception of motion at all.

But if her biotic charge was unremarkable in execution, it was spectacular in result. Riell, not seeing her coming and with only the barest of biotic barriers, was hit with the full force of Ariadne's charge. Their two barriers flashed for an instant with a loud crack, and then Riell was sailing through the air like she'd been hit with an iron wrecking ball, tumbling into the trees and leaving a trail of broken branches as she flew.

Still while they had yet to react to Ariadne's sudden attack, she turned her immediate attention to the two turians, Vernus and Patrus. Vernus was ripping up the shrubbery with an indiscriminate pull field, a minor offense in more regulated scenarios but perfectly legal here. She threw an unimaginative warp orb at his center of mass, sending him collapsing to the ground graining with intestinal agony. Patrus then turned, threw up a barrier, and with the strength of his rage alone attempted to take her down with his fists—a big mistake.

Ariadne simply slid under his mechanical attack, using her lithe frame and greater reflexes to great advantage as she skipped round and round the lumbering, enraged turian. Eventually he abandoned his biotic barrier and started throwing impulses about wildly in attempts to stop her harrying him. But once he dropped his barrier, Ariadne pounced with a cheeky biotic pull to yank his feet from under him. Once he was on the ground, she slugged him good with a one-armed biotic impulse, not enough to kill him—lethal moves were still disallowed—but more than enough to put him out and give the science lab some practice time.

As she stood catching her breath, Ariadne saw Dennick lying unconscious in the brush a few feet away with no sign of his assailant. She quickly checked that she still had the mission flag, and her chronometer now read _18:40_. Ariadne had a giddy head-rush. She was going to do it!

And then someone flew at her from behind.

Ariadne crashed to the ground, a pair of arms locked around her throat with vicious intent. As she pitched forward, her head struck a rock, stunning her and leaving her momentarily helpless while her assailant cinched in their grip.

"Think you're so special now, huh? Think you amount to anything, you and your handicapped genes?" a voice growled venomously into her ear. It was Riell.

Ariadne clawed feebly at her choke-hold, already strangling in the woman's grip. "You are nothing, Nelys! Nothing!" Riell shrieked. "You're not fit to breed, you're not even fit to live!"

In a last desperate gambit, Ariadne tried another barrier to put distance between her and Riell, but her energy was well and truly exhausted now, and if she couldn't get more air in her lungs, she'd never have a chance to recover any of that energy. Riell wanted her dead as dead could be, the rules be hanged, and she couldn't seem to find any way out of it. Ariadne's vision blurred until she could see only a tiny spot down a long purple tunnel. She felt herself losing consciousness. She had failed.

Suddenly, Riell's weight was pulled off her, the grip around her throat loosened. Ariadne gasped for breath as someone above her screamed. She heard the wet crunch of bones breaking and then felt a body landing next to her.

_"Are you okay?"_

Ariadne vaguely registered the voice as she drew in breath with heaving coughs. Eventually she looked up to see a human woman offering her a helping hand. She took it gratefully and pulled herself upright.

"Thanks," she said, massaging her throat.

The human woman, tall, blonde, and muscular, grunted in reply, then pitched over and vomited in the sand.


End file.
